Surgeons has successfully transplant a pig’s heart into 58-year-old Lawrence Faucette who was facing death with end-stage heart disease on Wednesday,, the doctors announced Friday—marking just the second time this procedure, which doctors hope leads to a breakthrough in saving the lives of terminal heart disease patients, has been performed.
The surgeons, with the University of Maryland Medical Center, prepared for a pig heart transplant into Lawrence Faucette at the school’s hospital in Baltimore, Md., in September 2023.
Two days after the transplant, Faucette was cracking jokes and able to sit in a chair, doctors said Friday.
Two days after the surgery, called a xenotransplantation, doctors said that Faucette is able to breathe on his own, his new heart is functioning properly without any assistance from supportive devices and he is able to communicate with his loved ones.
The pig heart was genetically modified to adapt to a human body and Faucette is being given an experimental antibody therapy as well as conventional anti-rejection drugs that are designed to suppress his immune response and get his body to accept this foreign organ, the doctors said.
Doctors said the procedure was the only viable option for Faucette, who was facing near-certain death from heart failure as he was deemed ineligible for a traditional transplant with a human heart due to pre-existing peripheral vascular disease and complications he had with internal bleeding.
Faucette reportedly told doctors before the surgery that the experimental procedure was his “only real hope left” and said that the surgery team has “been incredible, but nobody knows from this point forward. At least now I have hope, and I have a chance.”
Bartley Griffith, the surgeon who transplanted the heart into Faucette, said the team is “incredibly grateful to Mr. Faucette for his bravery” and said the procedure will help advance understanding of the field
