Photo: EyePress News/Shutterstock
A porcine virus has been detected in a man who died two months after being thefirst person to receive a pig heart transplant.
David Bennett Sr., 57,died in Marchafter receiving the gene-edited pig heart from surgeons at the hospital on Jan. 7. The operation was a last-chance effort to save him after he was “deemed ineligible” for atraditional heart transplant.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization for the surgery under its compassionate use provision on New Year’s Eve.
Dr. Bartley Griffith, the professor of surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, performed the operation and toldThe New York Timesit’s possible the virus played a factor in Bennett’s death and “hitched a ride” into Bennett’s body through the pig. However, Dr. Griffith said there’s no indication the virus caused an infection nor that Bennett’s body refused the organ.
Experts said the pig was evaluated multiple times for the virus, but tests can only detect active versions and not latent ones that can lie dormant without detection.
“This doesn’t really scare us about the future of the field, unless for some reason this one incident is interpreted as a complete failure,” Dr. Griffith said, per the publication. “It is just a learning point. Knowing it was there, we’ll probably be able to avoid it in future.”
Doctors with the pig heart.EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
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“So we started thinking that the virus that showed up very early at Day 20 as just a twinkle started to grow in time, and it may have been the actor — it could have been the actor — that set this all off,” Dr. Griffith said, perThe New York Times.
Bennett was given cidofovir and intravenous immune globulin (IVIG), but it was unsuccessful as his new heart began to fail and doubled in size, the publication reported.
“What was the virus doing, if anything, that might have caused the swelling in his heart? Honestly we don’t know,” Griffith told theAssociated Press.
“The cause of death of pig heart recipient David Bennett, Sr, is still being studied. Dr. Bartley Griffith, who led the xenotransplant surgical team, recently presented preliminary findings at a scientific conference where he noted that research continues into various potential causes. Among these potential causes was the patient’s advanced state of heart failure before the transplant. Dr. Griffith also noted that they found evidence of a virus called porcine cytomegalovirus (pCMV) through highly sensitive special testing,” a spokesperson for the University of Maryland School of Medicine tell PEOPLE.
“There is no evidence that the virus caused an infection in the patient or infected any tissues or organs beyond the heart,” the university adds.
source: people.com
