Doctors Successfully Transplant Pig Hearts Into Two Newly Dead Patients
"In the recently deceased, the focus is on learning, studying, measuring and trying to really unravel what is going on in this brand new, incredible technology," said Dr. Robert Montgomery, a transplant surgeon at NYU Langone, where the operations took place. In other science news: organ donations on death row, CRISPR, cancer vaccines, fighting dementia, and more.
USA Today:
Latest Organ Transplant Milestone: Pig Hearts To Brain-Dead People
Doctors at NYU Langone Health have taken another step toward making pig organs available for transplant, by successfully implanting pig hearts into two newly deceased people. (Weintraub, 7/12)
AP:
Pig Organ Transplants Inch Closer With Testing In The Dead
The experiments announced Tuesday come after a historic but failed attempt earlier this year to use a pig’s heart to save a dying Maryland man — sort of a rehearsal before scientists try again in the living. Among the lessons: Practice with the deceased is important. “We learned so much from the first one that the second one is much better,” said Dr. Nader Moazami, who led the operations at NYU Langone Health. “You stand there in awe” when the pig heart starts to beat in a human body. (Neergaard, 7/12)
In other organ transplant news —
The Washington Post:
A Death Row Inmate Wants To Donate A Kidney. Texas Won’t Let Him.
Ramiro Gonzales has been on death row since 2006, when he was sentenced for the 2001 murder of an 18-year-old woman. He was 18 at the time of the shooting and a drug addict after an abusive childhood, his attorneys have said. Now, in an attempt to atone for his crime, he has petitioned for a temporary release to undergo organ donation surgery. The state of Texas, however, won’t allow it. Officials have objected to the procedure because of Gonzales’s approaching execution date. (Paul, 7/12)
More science and research developments —
Stat:
Verve Begins Human Tests Of First ‘Base Editor,’ Aiming At Heart Disease
Somewhere in New Zealand, the first patient ever has been dosed with a kind of gene-editing treatment known as a base editor, a newer way of utilizing CRISPR for gene editing. The company studying the treatment, Verve Therapeutics, announced the news Tuesday. (Herper and Molteni, 7/12)
The Boston Globe:
Boston Biotech Verve Tests ‘CRISPR 2.0′ In A Patient For The First Time
Scientists are rewriting the code of life with a new technology that promises to cure inherited diseases by precisely correcting genetic typos. Known as base editing, the technology empowers researchers to pick a single letter amongst the three billion that compose the human genome, erase it, and write a new letter in its place. (Cross, 7/12)
The Hill:
Amazon, Research Center Partner On Cancer Vaccine
Amazon will collaborate with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle on a Food and Drug Administration-approved clinical trial for a cancer vaccine. According to a filing with the National Institutes of Health, Fred Hutch is testing a “personalized” vaccine for patients with late-stage melanoma skin cancer and certain breast cancers that have spread throughout the body or are not responding to other treatment. (Mueller, 7/12)
Axios:
Training Your Brain To Reduce Risk Of Dementia
What if we could train our brains to keep dementia at bay? A new U.S. research study is trying to find a viable way. (Pandey, 7/12)
Stat:
Pioneers Of ‘Brain-Computer Interfaces’ Seek To Shape The Field's Future
Three years after he was paralyzed from the chest down, Ian Burkhart faced a dilemma. He received a phone call from the Ohio State University asking him, as one of the few patients with a spinal cord injury living near Columbus, Ohio, to join a brain-computer interface (BCI) study. (Welle, 7/13)
