A few months ago we were hoping we had taken a giant leap forward in the world of xenotransplantation. A terminally ill person had managed to live for almost three months with a pig’s heart in his chest. Now, as far as we know, we have learned that the failure of the transplant (well-known and, above all, preventable) could result from a risk: the swine virus.

A pig’s heart beats in the chest. Earlier in January, a team from the University of Maryland Medical Center (USA) transplanted a genetically modified pig heart to 57-year-old American David Bennett, whose surgery was his last chance. It was indeed a dangerous operation. In fact, despite great progress in this regard, the FDA only allowed it under “compassionate use” guidelines before the patient’s death was imminent.

Earlier in the year, news from the University of Maryland was that the pig’s heart was working properly and Bennett was slowly recovering. However, in early March his condition deteriorated rapidly and he eventually died. Since then, scientists around the world have been waiting for the first reports of deaths to further advance the development of xenotransplantation.

Virus. On April 20, transplant surgeon Bartley Griffith gave a speech at the American Transplant Association: What he said stunned everyone. As he explained, analyzes confirmed that David Bennett was infected with a porcine cytomegalovirus. “We’re starting to find out why he died. [el virus] “Griffit was, or could be, the actor who triggered it all,” he said in the MIT Technology Review.

It doesn’t matter, really. As Rafael Matesanz, one of the leading Spanish specialists at El País, recalls, when pig kidneys were implanted in monkeys in the 1990s, it was discovered that pig endogenous retroviruses also travel with the organs, and it is precisely these viruses that are behind many of the problems. caused.

One of the cornerstones of the new xenotransplantation is that we eventually have the technology to “cleanse” these organs and turn them into safe objects. What was the porcine cytomegalovirus doing in the patient (whether or not it caused transplant failure)? This is the question that urgently needs to be resolved now. First of all, we know that technology is safe.

The ghost of Gelsinger again. It’s not the first time that a major failure that has nothing to do with the technology in question has triggered a decades-long break in a research pipeline. We’ve been looking for the “holy grail” of transplants for a long time, and a setback like this could be one of the worst news of the year.

picture | University of Maryland