The second person ever to receive a heart transplant from a pig has died, doctors have said.
Lawrence Faucette, 58, received the organ at the University of Maryland‘s Medical Center after he suffered heart failure but was deemed ineligible for a traditional human heart transplant because of an underlying medical condition.
The father-of-two and 20-year Navy veteran was healthy for the first month after the transplant, doctors said.
But in recent days his body began to show signs of rejecting the organ — which is also the most significant challenge with human transplants. He died on Monday.
Mr Faucette lived with a pig heart for 40 days, which was not as long as David Bennett — the first person to receive a pig heart — who lived for 60 days after the operation.
Mr Faucette’s wife Ann said in a statement that her husband ‘knew his time with us was short and this was his last chance to do for others’.
‘He never imagined he would survive as long as he did.
She added: ‘He was a man who was always thinking of others, especially myself and his two sons. The kindness and selfless acts of others were not unnoticed.’
Dr Bartley Griffith, the surgeon who led the transplant, said: ‘Mr Faucette’s last wish was for us to make the most of what we have learned from our experience.’
‘We mourn the loss of Mr Faucette, a remarkable patient, scientist, Navy veteran and family man who just wanted a little more time to spend with his loving wife, sons and family.’
The Maryland team performed the world´s first transplant of a heart from a genetically-altered pig into another dying man, David Bennett, on January 7 last year.
It was not clear why the experiment failed, but signs of a pig virus were later found inside the organ.
Changes in the transplant were made for the second experiment, including better virus testing.
Mr Faucette was a navy veteran and father-of-two from Frederick, Maryland.
He came to the Maryland hospital with heart problems but was left out of options because of his other health problems, leading him to agree to the pig heart transplant.
Attempts at animal-to-human organ transplants — medically-termed xenotransplants — have failed for decades, as people´s immune systems immediately destroyed the foreign tissue.
But now scientists are trying again using pigs genetically modified to make their organs more humanlike.
Many scientists hope xenotransplants could one day could compensate for the huge shortage of human organ donations.
More than 100,000 people are on the nation´s list for a transplant, most awaiting kidneys, and thousands will die waiting.
A handful of scientific teams have tested pig kidneys and hearts in monkeys and in donated human bodies, hoping to learn enough for the Food and Drug Administration to allow formal xenotransplant studies.
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