Second Maryland Man to Receive an Altered Pig’s Heart Has Died
By Roni Caryn Rabin,
The New York Times
| 10. 31. 2023
A 58-year-old man with heart failure who received a new heart from a genetically modified pig died on Monday, nearly six weeks after receiving the pig organ, University of Maryland Medical Center officials announced on Tuesday.
Lawrence Faucette, of Frederick, Md., was the second patient at the medical center to have had an ailing heart replaced with one from a pig that had been genetically modified so its organs would be more compatible with a human recipient and would not be rejected by the human immune system.
The first patient, 57-year-old David Bennett, died last year, two months after his transplant. He had developed multiple complications, and traces of a virus that infects pigs were found in his new heart.
Both of the patients had terminal heart disease when they received the transplanted organs, and neither managed to recover sufficiently to leave the hospital. But while doctors said that Mr. Bennett did not show any signs of acute rejection of the new heart, which is the most significant risk in organ transplants, they said that Mr. Faucette’s transplanted heart had...
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