The first person to receive a gene-edited pig heart has died two months after the historic transplant.
Dave Bennett passed away on Tuesday afternoon at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore.
It was today unclear whether his body had rejected the foreign organ but his death was a setback for surgeons working to give others the gift of life.
“There was no obvious cause identified at the time of his death,” a hospital spokeswoman said.
Hospital officials said they could not comment further on the cause of death, as doctors had yet to conduct a thorough examination.
Dr Bartley Griffith, the surgeon who performed the transplant, said the hospital’s staff were “devastated” by the death.
“He proved to be a brave and noble patient who fought all the way to the end,” he said.
“Mr Bennett became known by millions of people around the world for his courage and steadfast will to live.”
The pioneering patient, who had a life-threatening condition underwent the groundbreaking nine-hour operation after not qualifying for a human heart.
In the first days since receiving the organ, he had shown no signs of rejection.
Speaking of the procedure, Dr Griffith said at the time of the transplant: “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.”
Mr Bennett agreed to be the first to risk the experimental surgery in December, hoping it would give him a new life.
“This is nothing short of a miracle,” his son David Jr said.
“That’s what my dad needed and that’s what I feel like he got.”
Doctors replaced his heart with one from a one-year-old, 17-stone pig gene-edited and bred specifically for this purpose.
Dr Griffith said he first mentioned the experimental treatment last month, saying it was a “memorable” and “pretty strange” conversation.
“I said, ‘We can’t give you a human heart. You don’t qualify. But maybe we can use one from an animal, a pig,” Dr Griffith recalled. “It’s never been done before, but we think we can do it.’”
“I wasn’t sure he was understanding me,” the doctor added. “Then he said, ‘Well, will I oink?’”
Mr Bennett had breathed on his own without a ventilator, though he remains on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine that is doing about half the work of pumping blood throughout his body.
After making headlines through the transplant it emerged Mr Bennet had a criminal record stemming from an assault 34 years ago, in which he repeatedly stabbed a young man in a fit of jealousy, leaving him paralysed.
The victim, Edward Shumaker, spent two decades in a wheelchair and suffered numerous medical complications including a stroke that left him cognitively impaired.
He died in 2007 at age 40, according to his sister, Leslie Shumaker Downey.
