Biologist Kiselev named the possible cause of death of a patient with a pig heart transplant

The second person who received a foreign organ has died in the United States.

A second pig heart transplant patient died last Monday in the United States, six weeks after the operation. This was reported by the University of Maryland Medical Center. Russian biologist from the Institute of General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergei Kiselev explained what this could be connected with.

“We are saddened by the loss of Mr. Fawcett, a wonderful patient,” said Dr. Bartley P. Griffith, who performed the surgery. “He was a Navy veteran who wanted to live with his family a little longer.”

A heart transplant is a surgical procedure to replace a patient’s heart with a donor’s heart. It is indicated for severe diseases in which other operations are impossible or extremely risky. Your own heart can be removed or left behind.

Nowadays, hearts from human donors are successfully transplanted in various clinics around the world. This has become a fairly routine operation, after which on average patients live more than 10 years. The world record for life expectancy with a heart transplant is held by Tony Huseman – he lived with a heart transplant for more than 30 years and died of skin cancer.

Doctors resorted to animal heart transplants due to a shortage of donor organs; this first happened in 1964. The chimpanzee’s heart was then transplanted into James Hardy. The patient died an hour and a half after the operation.

In 2022, Americans transplanted a pig heart into a human for the first time. 57-year-old David Bennett agreed to this experiment because, due to the severity of the disease, a human organ transplant was impossible. Alas, Bennett died two months later, in March last year.

His follower, who also received a pig heart, lived two weeks less. Lawrence Fawcett, 58, was doing well after surgery, “doing physical therapy, spending time with family and playing cards with his wife,” the clinic said in a statement. However, in recent days he began to show signs of rejection of the new organ. Fossett died on October 30.

Comment by Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor, Head of the Laboratory of Epigenetics at the Institute of General Genetics named after N.I. Vavilov RAS Sergei Kiselev:

– I don’t know in detail why the second patient died… Regarding the first, there was a report that the cause of rejection could have been porcine cytomegalovirus found in the transplanted heart.

– Is it difficult to clean a donor organ of all viruses?

– The virus was endogenous, so it was not possible to get rid of it. This was not an ordinary heart, but the heart of a genome-edited pig, from which all known endogenous viral sequences were removed and modifications were made to bring it as immunologically as close to a human as possible. However, the cytomegalovirus still remained.

– Where else in the world can similar operations be performed in the near future?

– I know that the Chinese are actively working in this direction, but, unlike the Americans, they are not too willing to share information.

– Are there similar works in Russia?

– No Unfortunately. I think that the failures that are now plaguing American scientists are normal for the development of such a complex area of ​​science. And the usual transplantation (from person to person) was not successful the first time. As for pig heart transplantation, there are problems with biocompatibility, which each time need to be analyzed and discussed in the scientific community.