The patient has not been connected to a heart-lung machine since Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore said on Wednesday. “His heart is beating well. He continues to recover.”
In a milestone in the field of organ transplantation, the genetically modified organ was inserted in the 57-year-old who is suffering from a life-threatening heart disease on Friday. The operation took around eight hours, according to US media. The patient should be closely observed over the coming weeks.
The veterinarian Heiner Niemann from the Medical University of Hanover said that it was a man who was no longer on the waiting list for a donor heart because of violating the requirements and for whom the animal organ was the last alternative to death. His survival for a few days shows that the team has at least got the dangerous direct rejection reaction under control.
The so-called xenotransplantation has been researched since the 1980s. Pigs are particularly suitable as donors because their metabolism is similar to that of humans.
Source: Nachrichten
