The man with the pig heart is dead. A swine virus killed him
Image credit: University of Maryland Medical Center)
Unfortunately, the first pig-to-human heart transplant, a step forward in solving the problem of the very long waiting lists for transplants, ended with the death of the patient. A pig virus may have contributed to the death of the man who had undergone such an extraordinary operation.
The man, David Bennett Sr., 57, died on March 8, two months after his pig heart transplant surgery. The heart used in the transplant came from a pig that had been genetically engineered to make its heart more acceptable to the human immune system.
Now, Dr. Bartley Griffith, director of the heart transplant program at the University of Maryland Medical Center who performed the transplant, has revealed that DNA from porcine cytomegalovirus, a virus that infects pigs, was detected in the patient prior to the his death, according to MIT's Technology Review.
"We are beginning to understand why he died," Griffith said in a webinar on April 20 about the transplant, MIT Technology Review reported. The virus "maybe it was the trigger, or it could have been."
Doctors have examined the pig's heart multiple times for this virus, but such tests detect only active infections, not latent infections where the virus is latent in the body without actively replicating, according to the New York Times .
But 20 days after the transplant, blood tests revealed low levels of porcine cytomegalovirus DNA in Bennett's body, the Times reported. At first, doctors thought it might be a lab error. Within 40 days of the transplant, however, Bennett became seriously ill and tests showed a sharp rise in viral DNA levels in his blood, the Times reported.
Porcine cytomegalovirus is specific to pigs and is not believed to be capable of infecting human cells. However, the virus may have suddenly replicated out of control in the pig's heart, without the human immune system being able to suppress it. This may have triggered an inflammatory response in the patient, MIT Technology Review reported, and thus death.
So the human-animal transplant is still a dream, or a purely emergency solution. There are still many viruses or latent diseases of animals that the human immune system, among other things depressed by anti-rejection drugs, does not fight. The times are not yet ripe, but this remains a hope for the future.
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The article The man with the pig heart is dead. A swine virus that killed him comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/luomo-con-il-cuore-di-maiale-e-morto-un-virus-suino-lo-ha-ucciso/ on Fri, 06 May 2022 21:12:53 +0000.