Lawrence Faucette, the second living person to receive a genetically modified pig heart in a transplant, has died six weeks after the experimental procedure. The University of Maryland Medical Center, where the experimental procedure had been performed, said the heart began to show signs of rejection in recent days.
“Mr. Faucette’s last wish was for us to make the most of what we have learned from our experience, so others may be guaranteed a chance for a new heart when a human organ is unavailable. He then told the team of doctors and nurses who gathered around him that he loved us. We will miss him tremendously,” Dr. Bartley Griffith, clinical director of the Cardiac Xenotransplantation Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said in a statement. Griffith had performed the experimental surgery.
A lot of people think that regular human transplants are problem free but the vast majority of them are rejected by the receiver. If it’s for a life saving procedure it can only extend the life span by so much…
My dad had a double lung transplant several months ago…we were told by his transplant team that, with transplants, rejection is a “when”, not an “if”. However, if caught early enough, the docs can do an incredible amount to combat rejection.
Complete layperson here but it kind of astounds me that we haven’t cracked the code for this friend-or-foe identification. One would think there is some identifier or expression that is evaluated by the immune system and if we could match that we’d be golden but clearly not that simple.
I started reading the book Immune by the team that runs the Kurzgesagt (In a Nutshell) YouTube channel. The book is written for laypeople like us to understand, but I didn’t get very far before going “holy shit this is ridiculously complicated”. Honestly, just the fact that scientists understand any of this astounds me.
Years of dedication, my friend.
Surprisingly, things become simpler when there are more eyes looking at them. The more esoteric something is, the harder it will be to grasp because there are fewer resources to help you.
Taking immunology right now, it’s incredibly complicated. Immune cells aren’t like any other cells in our bodies, they’re absolutely bonkers.
Our bodies are just winging it. It’s both beautiful and goodness and all kinds of other things but it’s a bit philosophical at times.
I had ITP. Autoimmune something which means they don’t know what caused it but my body stopped acknowledging that parts of my blood cell, not the entire one just a piece of it, we’re not me. Of course not me gets flushed out.
But the fancy words for part of a blood cell is called a platelet if you don’t have any platelets you don’t clot. As you can probably pick up not being able to clot is a big problem. I was in danger of bleeding out because my body decided to take out all my platelets.
Seems like an easy problem. If a whole blood cell is me because the DNA matches and all kinds of other things, obviously one cell of me is one cell of me. But if you take one cell of me and you break it up into pieces is it still one cell of me? By definition is not it is 50% of me…
So one cell of me is obviously me and one cell of you is obviously you but what happens when we get into percents at what percent does my cell stop becoming me?
Biology is not as simple as 1s and 0s. We want it too be. But it’s just more complex.
Fair enough.
These are very complicated processes that are difficult to interpret with such a (relatively) small number of people looking at it.
Honestly, this might sound weird, but if my body ever got to that point, I’d rather just go die in a war.
Better to go out with a bang than a wimper, imo.
Lmao yeah you say that now
I’m just curious if you have data behind this?
My understanding is that rejection related deaths in solid organ transplant recipients is only ~18% and that it is actually trending downward.
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That’s not actually how it works. Rejection of a transplanted organ means the body is developing antibodies against the organ.
Successful dosing and continued use of immunosuppressants inhibit the body from “rejecting” the transplanted organ(s).
I suspect you’re operating off a commonly held idea that transplanted organs have a “shelf life” but that’s not really true.
It’s important to keep in mind that transplanting organs is still comparatively new medical science (only about 70 years old) and that transplants are often for older patients or patients with other underlying conditions that caused the original organ failure to begin with.
I don’t want people to see this as a failure.
Experiments are how we gain new information to try better the next time.
Ultimately these experiments are reserved for people who are ineligible for traditional heart transplants. This person was granted an extra six weeks with their family which is easy to overlook but the family likely cherished every moment.
I guess we’ll have to wait a bit to find out what killed him. The first person died due to several things like his condition and the heart had a pig virus.
The pathogen issue is a real hurdle to overcome. I am wondering if we will get viable 3D printed hearts before we get viable transplants from other species.
3D-printed or stem-cell grown so they’re just new, hot-swappable copies of our own organs, minus defects thanks to CRISPR 🤯
Griffith had performed the experimental surgery
Fitting name
