NYU surgeon transplants an engineered pig kidney into the outside of a brain-dead patient (Joe Carrotta/NYU Langone Health)
A virus may have driven the death of the first patient to receive a genetically modified pig heart
Doctors may be closing in on an answer for why the first human transplanted with a genetically modified pig heart died last month, around 60 days after the procedure. If accurate, it may amount to an unforced error at one of the most sensitive moments in modern medical history.
At a webinar last month, Bartley Griffith, the surgeon who performed the procedure, revealed that the heart patient, 57-year-old David Bennett, was infected with a pig virus called porcine cytomegalovirus, or pCMV.
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