The tale of a man whose life was saved when a genetically modified pig’s heart was transplanted into his body sounds like a dose of science fiction with a rustic twist.
That notion isn’t entirely off the mark, as in fact this electrifying international news originates in Southwest Virginia.
To clarify, the surgery took place at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore. The heart came from the Blacksburg area.
On Jan. 7, a team of surgeons replaced 57-year-old David Bennett’s ailing heart with a new one taken from a pig raised by Revivicor, a biotechnology company in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center. The company specializes in altering pigs’ DNA so that organs such as lungs, kidneys and hearts can be harvested for human transplant.
Dying from heart failure, ruled ineligible for a normal heart transplant, Bennett volunteered for the experimental surgery, telling university staff, “I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice.”
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Even in those circumstances, Bennett appears to have maintained a sense of humor. In an account from the Washington Post, after a doctor first explained the procedure, Bennett, after a pause, asked, “Well, will I oink?”
As of Jan. 11, Bennett had been taken off the heart-lung machine supporting his new heart and was breathing on his own. His son, David Bennett Jr., shared with the press that his father was in considerable pain and had a long road through recovery ahead, but was determined to see it through.
It’s still far too soon to know if the surgery truly heralds hope for the hundreds of thousands who need heart transplants, but the fact that it worked at all astonishes and suggests the way forward will be worth the journey.
Revivicor chief scientific officer David Ayares told Roanoke Times writer Alison Graham, “The organ is life-supporting, and it’s doing its job.”
The miracle does not come without warts-and-all caveats. Important as the company’s work is, Revivicor’s very business model and mission, which require experimentation on animals, might be hard for some to take. Just as a general example, Christiansburg, only eight miles south of Blacksburg, once had an explicit ban on laboratory testing of animals for business purposes in its town code. The ban was removed in 2019 after a query about a site from a business reportedly similar to Revivicor.
As news of Bennett’s successful surgery circulated worldwide, a second, less wholesome discovery circulated soon after. In 1988, Bennett committed a brutal assault in a bar. Angered by 22-year-old Edward Shumaker’s flirtations with the woman who was then his wife, Bennett stabbed Shumaker multiple times. Paralyzed for the rest of his life, Shumaker died in 2015. Bennett served six years in prison and moved on to participate in a scientific leap of progress.
Bennett’s past may sound a sour note, but it does not lessen the magnitude of the breakthrough. With these complexities, too, the speculation inherent in science fiction becomes reality.
Revivicor’s innovations involve making genetic tweaks to the pigs so that a human who receives one of these modified organs won’t instantly reject it as antibodies attack the foreign tissue. Graham’s excellent piece on how the successful transplant plants Revivicor on the world stage (Jan. 13, “Blacksburg company raised genetically modified pig for first heart transplant into human”) details the genetic tweaks in plain language.
Should Bennett’s new heart prove longlasting, the door opens to alleviating the long waiting list for organ transplants, a wait that costs lives. As phrased by Dr. Bartley Griffith, the surgeon who performed Bennett’s transplant, “There are simply not enough donor human hearts available to meet the long list of potential recipients.”
Beyond xenotransplantation — the term for organ transplants between species — Revivicor has also pursued having pigs produce human insulin for treatment of diabetes.
In a delightful pop culture callback, the Blacksburg lab has a corporate lineage that traces back to PPL Therapeutics, the Scottish biotechnology firm that in 1996 famously cloned Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.
In October, after the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC in Roanoke celebrated the grand opening of a 139,000-square-foot addition, founding executive director Michael Friedlander talked to The Roanoke Times about what it means to put our region on the biotechnology map.
To take Friedlander’s explanation and expand it beyond the Fralin Institute’s own considerable achievements, the idea is that buzz caused by major industry innovations here in our hometowns would make our Blue Ridge Mountains “an attractive landing site for entrepreneurs, for companies, for inventors, for other scientists.”
What kind of breakthrough would generate that level of enticing, globe-spanning buzz? Well, here is an example.