I wonder why they finally got around to doing this. I've heard about it for decades.
The doctor said: "It creates the pulse, it creates the pressure, it is his heart. It’s working and it looks normal. We are thrilled, but we don’t know what tomorrow will bring us. This has never been done before.... The anatomy was a little squirrelly, and we had a few moments of ‘uh-oh’ and had to do some clever plastic surgery to make everything fit."
The pig anatomy was squirrelly.
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47 comments:
The medical community has a lot of those uh-oh moments nowadays, don’t they?
The procedure was a bear. The obvious problems were like an elephant in the room. If you drew the steps, it would look like a spider web. Or a magpie's nest. Soon the patient will be as good as new: like a chimp at the zoo.
Mmmmmmm…bacon.
I wonder why they finally got around to doing this. I've heard about it for decades.
Ya…and what ever happened to that ‘scaffolding’ trick where they were going to grow us new organs from our own cells?
Bruce Willis played a squirrel in a film animation. And the just of the character was to talk in bursts of words and suddenly stop, pause, and go on another burst of words again. Maybe that’s what was happening with the pigs heart. It would pump, stop, and then start up again. Squirrelly.
My question is why did he give up on getting a transplant from the waitlist and resort to an experimental pig heart. Last year in the US there were 3,817 heart transplant vs. just 248 deaths on the heart transplant waitlist. What was it about his case that made him a better pig candidate than he was a candidate to just wait a bit longer on the list?
They did this with
a baby and a baboon almost forty years ago, and she might have lived but for a blood type incompatibility. Paul Simon wrote about it in a song:
Medicine is magical and magical is art
Think of the boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart
Mansquirrelpig! Somebody alert Al Gore.
"It was either die or do this transplant. I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice."
Then he better use this time to get right with his conscience, because how much more time does he really think a pig heart will give him? Even in a best-case scenario?
How exactly is the heart “genetically altered” is what I’d like to know.
https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/9152951002
The USA Today link above does offer a (non-paywall blocked) explanation of 10 genes edited in the pig, apparently at the embryonic stage. The subject is lightly covered but reading between the lines I got the gist of what the mods to the genes are designed to do. Apparently just surviving so far, with a big assist from ECMO machines, is the big deal. He is still waiting for a human heart to be available. Interesting. What if the pig heart keeps exceeding expectations? He might be able to rely on only the pig heart.
I wonder why they finally got around to doing this. I've heard about it for decades.
The more you learn about what is involved in anything, the more you wonder why anything works at all.
The answer is obvious to people who have no idea what the hurdles were and no
But the more you know about it the more you are going to move towards "It only took decades to do that?"
Re: The pig anatomy was squirrelly.
Excellent!
When I was young, I wanted to be a heart surgeon. This was the era of Christiaan Barnard - my heroes were Denton Cooley and Michael DeBakey. I did a science fair project comparing different animal hearts and even had a pig's heart and a cow heart on display. The pig's heart is the closest to a human heart in almost every aspect. Even back in 1970, they were talking about the possibility of a pig's heart being transplanted into a human. The main stumbling block being rejection by the immune system. I am surprised that it has taken this long to overcome that hurdle.
First bacon, now this? Sucks to be a pig.
The pig anatomy was squirrelly.
Lucky thing they didn't try a squirrel heart!
Humans blood demands, are Way too piggish for that
I'll bet the sunovabitch is good at finding truffles.
"The anatomy was a little squirrelly,"
That comment surprises me. We used pigs in our cardiac imaging research procedures because they are so close to people. You can get pigs that are "people size" too, which mattered because you need to mimic people's girth to challenge the procedure appropriately. Though pigs aren't perfected in this regard; they don't put on fat in the torso the way people do.
There was a pharmacological problem; we needed to manipulate heart rate and pigs don't respond to metoprolol (used to slow the heart rate) like people. In fact, they don't respond to it at all. I've got a picture of a pig on the imaging table and dozens of metoprolol vials scattered around. It might as well have been saline. Set our research back at least a year dealing with that problem.
Yes last year almost 4000 donor hearts were transplanted into a few of the 100,000 people on the waiting list. Why indeed didn’t he just wait with his failing ticker! /sarc
Tom T. said...
"They did this with
a baby and a baboon almost forty years ago"
I remember a joke that was going around at the time.
What's the fastest thing on 2 wheels?
A baboon on a bicycle going past Loma Linda Hospital.
"The anatomy was a little squirrely..."
Obviously an Ageism slur, with you ignoring the thinly-veiled connection between 'squirrel' and 'grey'.
Laugh it up, you're getting older too.
Plot twist: The guy is vegan.
"My question is why did he give up on getting a transplant from the waitlist and resort to an experimental pig heart. Last year in the US there were 3,817 heart transplant vs. just 248 deaths on the heart transplant waitlist. What was it about his case that made him a better pig candidate than he was a candidate to just wait a bit longer on the list?"
A good question- possible answers: (1) his biology is a hard to match profile, so his chances are much lower than normal; (2) he is way down on the waitlist for other reasons not mentioned. I would wager the first one is the reason.
"Yes last year almost 4000 donor hearts were transplanted into a few of the 100,000 people on the waiting list. Why indeed didn’t he just wait with his failing ticker! /sarc"
Interesting- so only 284 of those other 96,000 died in the last year, but it will be 25 years before all of them get a donor heart. There must be a large amount of churn in that 100,000 cohort under the surface. It makes think, if the numbers cited above are all correct, that a lot more people die on the waiting list than 284.
But do NOT BRING THAT IVERMECTIN into MY HOSPITAL!!!
One could also always accept that this worldly existence is not the be all and end all. That death comes to us all. And that if you are concerned about life, that there is life available after this if you accept it.
Squirrely barges Ft Madison swing bridge
Average life expectancy of a pig: 12-16 years.
I have an arrhythmia that jolts me when my heart skips a beat. I shall now call it "squirrels in the chest".
The good new is, he'll eat anything you throw in a bucket and scatter out in the yard.
'Plot twist: The guy is vegan.'
Muslim would be better.
That'll do...
The anatomy was a little squirrelly, and we had a few moments of ‘uh-oh’ and had to do some clever plastic surgery to make everything fit.
I'm thinking of a bunch of dudes staring under the hood of a '74 Chevy Impala, wanting to replace a part with a homebrew solution. "How about we weld a clamp there, run some pipe around to the other side?" "That might work, let's try it."
If you remove a tribal heart, in this case from the pig tribe, and place it into the tribal body of a body that belongs to the human tribe you are definitely swimming in uncharted tribal waters of tribalism.
Yancey Ward said...
It makes think, if the numbers cited above are all correct, that a lot more people die on the waiting list than 284.
Those 284 were the only ones that didn't pop on PCR tests with the cycle time cranked.
The rest died with COVID and were counted in a different group.
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
How exactly is the heart “genetically altered” is what I’d like to know.
It is not the heart.
It is the immune system. They have to suppress it so it doesn't attack the heart while it grows. They created pigs with very suppressed immune systems.
At least we don't have to worry about these pigs escaping the lab.
Scot at 11:24 a.m.
🤣🤣🤣
He wasn't eligible for the waitlist due to his poor overall health.
The were able to try this now due to advancements in genetics which reduced the possibility of rejection.
His chances of survival are poor.
The "100,000 people on the waitlist" number seems to include all organ transplants.
The guy should avoid mud in all its forms.
Davey “Pig Ticker” Bennett would be a good name for a white blues man.
I hope they don't eat the guy all at once.
My wife's little brother (eight years after her, after four kids already) was for a brief time medical history as the youngest person to receive open heart surgery. He was about 2 I think.
This was about '62 or '63 IIRC. He underwent several more before I met her, and lived to his early '30s.
Good luck pigheart dude.
Some say men are all pigs. Their names are Karen.
There are currently 3,469 awaiting heart transplants in the US. There will likely be over 3900 heart transplants over the next 12 months. The likely of a waited listed patient receiving a heart transplant is actually quite good. The vast majority of those on the overall US waitlist of 100k+ are waiting kidney transplants while on dialysis. The US has the highest donation rate in the world.
If it works long term it will be impressive. The guy rolled the dice and so far he is winning. Good luck to him.
"At least we don't have to worry about these pigs escaping the lab"
I had a recurring nightmare during my working years. One of our pigs had escaped and I was chasing him around the hallways of the hospital. I HAD to catch him, quickly, or they were going to shut down all animal experiments in the medical school and it was going to be my fault.
I hated that dream.
the danger of these tranplants is that a pig virus will mutate and spread, causing an epidemic.
https://biosecurity.fas.org/education/dualuse-agriculture/2.-agricultural-biotechnology/pig-xenographs-risk-of-endogenous-viruses.html
"the danger of these tranplants is that a pig virus will mutate and spread, causing an epidemic."
Unlike the vain research Fauci's comrades were engaged in (what was the upside?), we have to do this. Transplanted organs can extend the lives of hundreds of millions, if we only have the supply.
Václav Patrik Šulik said...
The main stumbling block being rejection by the immune system. I am surprised that it has taken this long to overcome that hurdle.
Really? Have you not been paying attention the last two years?
I mean, it's pretty clear we still don't know sh!t about the immune system, since the vast majority of the serious damage caused by Covid is caused by poor reactions by your immune system, reactions we're not good at stopping.
And then there's the Covid shots. How many billion dollars were spent on creating "vaccines" that don't even stop the virus from growing in the people "vaccinated"?
As an answer on a undergraduate bio test, I could tell you "exactly how to make that transplant work".
But most things are easier to write on a test form, than to actually do
Kramer finds the "pig man" and "liberates" him from the hospital. The "pig man" subsequently steals George's car, which was again conveniently parked. Later, a sheepish Kramer reveals that the "pig man" is actually "a fat little mental patient".
A sheepish Kramer...
Can I get a dog liver and a side of monkey glands with that pig heart?
Maybe Ronald McDonald House will package the deal as the David Crosby or Keith Richards meal.
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