Upcycled organs and pig hearts: where cardiac transplant is headed

It's been about a year since the world first met David Bennett. Here are the man's seams. To be weakly singing, he was strongly recovering, 37 days into being the first person to have a Xenotransplant. Simply, the first to get a genetically modified pig's heart. The procedure was considered an early success with no rejection, sitting up singing, watching the Super Bowl. But doctors were shocked and loved

ones were saddened when things quickly turned. Bennett's heart was swelling and failing. He died 60 days after the surgery. We spent the last four years trying to figure out what happened. I'm not sure we're there yet. We did see an activation of a virus that's only a pig virus that didn't infect Dave, but it certainly seemed to infect his new heart. Dr. Bartley Griffiths surgically transplanted

that's what we're proposing right now. That does not mean a second transplant soon. Medical teams have to go through research, ethics, committees, and logistics. The biotech company behind the genetically modified hearts is building a facility hoping to meet FDA standards to make more quickly. Scientists are also studying baboons with pig heart transplant's meantime to learn about how long immune suppressing drugs would be needed to prevent

longer term rejection. And Dr. Griffith and team will have to get the FDA's OK to do another procedure. Meanwhile popping up in hospitals across the country, a few dozen transplant teams are using another futuristic approach. This one nicknamed heartner box. Surgeons like Dr. Ben Breiner are implementing the device that's using warmth instead of ice to keep a donor heart viable for longer. It has a gas

exchanger that does the work of the lungs. It has a pump that circulates blood through the heart. It has various ports where we can sample blood and give medications into the system. So it's all self contained and portable, which is important, but it also builds on technology that we use every day. So tell me a little bit about the significance of time. It's really in heart

surgery. Time is always really important in any form of transplant and in heart transplant it's even the most pressing. So we really only have four hours from the time we take the heart out of the donor to the time we restore blood flow to the heart in the recipient. Meaning the four heartner box, doctors are stuck traveling no more than 90 minutes in each direction. This

gets rid of that. It's also allowing more donor hearts. Before hearts could only come from brain dead patients whose hearts were still beating. In donors who were not brain dead, doctors had to wait five minutes after the heart stopped cardiac death, usually too long for it to be usable for transplant. And while upcycled hearts and genetically altered pig organs might feel more like Frankenstein, the innovation

could fill a growing need. Last year, more than 5,000 patients were added to the heart transplant waiting list. Already in 2023, those numbers are nearly 40%. Lindsay Thes, Scripps News, Chicago.