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In 2022, David Bennett, a 57-year-old man from the US, became the first human to receive a genetically modified pig’s heart. Unfortunately, he passed away two months after the surgery, not because of his body rejecting the foreign organ but because the donor’s heart was already infected by a virus.
This year, the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM), which performed the surgery on Bennett, performed its second transplant on a 58-year-old man on September 20. According to UMSOM, it was the second time in the world that a genetically modified pig heart had been transplanted into a living patient.
