Why Did the First Human Patient to Receive a Pig Heart Transplant Die?

^{Photo by Arseny Togulev on Unsplash}

Bartley Griffith is a cardiac surgeon at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, who says he’s probably done over a thousand heart transplants over a career that has spanned four decades. But on January 7 of this year, Griffith performed an operation unlike any other. He transplanted a pig heart into a human for the first time.

When Griffith released the clamp off of his 57-year-old patient’s new heart, blood rushed through David Bennett’s coronary arteries and transformed the pale lifeless pig organ into a vivacious scarlet pump. “The heart fired right up,” Griffith says.

But 60 days later, Bennett passed away, and doctors could not identify a specific cause of death. Answers have only now begun to emerge after Griffith’s team published their report of the historic operation in The New England Journal of Medicine. Considering the reasons why Bennett may have died will help doctors as they prepare for future pig heart transplants.

“Cardiac xenotransplantation,” or the transfer of a heart between species, was first performed in 1964 with a human recipient...