NYU Langone doctors reveal successes transplanting genetically modified pig hearts into humans
NEW YORK -- It's a major development in the world of organ donation. Doctors at NYU recently transplanted pig hearts into two humans who were brain dead.
As CBS2's Lisa Rozner reported Tuesday, the results show animal organs could soon play a huge role in saving lives.
Larry Kelly, a 72-year-old Vietnam veteran in Pennsylvania, loved fishing and he loved his partner of 33 years, Alice Michael.
"He liked to fix things, and was very upset because he could not fix my cancer," Michael said.
READ MORE: Human Patient Receives Pig Heart In First-Of-Its-Kind Transplant
Kelly died in June from a heart attack and was declared brain dead. Because he had a history of heart disease, including two open-heart surgeries, his partner consented to NYU to keep his body on life support for research.
Last month, doctors flew to Virginia to remove a similar-sized heart of a genetically modified pig and fly it back.
"The old heart was taken out and the pig heart completely replaced it and was able to do all of the things that the heart has to do to maintain blood flow," said Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the Transplant Institute at NYU Langone Health.
Just last week, a similar heart transplant was performed on 64-year-old Alva Capuano of Stuyvesant Town. NYU said the former teacher died of cardiac arrest, likely due to complications from diabetes.
For the study, both Capuano and Kelly were kept on life support for 72 hours following the transplant to see if the pig heart could keep up.
"It was, I think, one of the most incredible things to see a pig heart pounding away and beating inside the chest of a human being," Montgomery said.
"This is really a milestone and a stepping stone in the right direction for someday, hopefully, making this clinically applicable to save the lives of many individuals," said Dr. Nader Moazami, surgical director of heart transplantation at NYU Langone Health.
Moazami says 6 million people in the U.S. have heart failure, yet only a few thousand heart transplants are done every year.
Kelly's family hopes the study leads to changes for others down the road who struggle to get a transplant.
"He was a hero his whole life and he went out a hero," Michael said.
Doctors say the next steps in the study will include studying the transplant over a longer period of time. This past fall, NYU doctors successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a recently deceased human.