Earlier this month, the first human pig heart transplant took place. To keep the heart beating during the long operation, surgeons had to use a cocktail of drugs that had cocaine in its composition. But calm down: the doctors even had authorization from the Drug Enforcement Administration, a US agency in charge of the repression and control of narcotics.
The mixture of substances had to be injected into the pig’s heart to prolong its longevity. Developed by the Swedish pharmaceutical company XVIVO, the cocktail has several other ingredients, including cortisol and adrenaline.
“Before using this solution, we were failing. But when we started to infuse the heart with this solution, the organ was well preserved and started to beat very well. If we hadn’t done that, the rejection would have happened in minutes, and the organ would have been useless,” explains Muhammad Mohiuddin, director of heart transplantation at the University of Maryland Medical Center (the medical center responsible for the transplant), in an interview with Vice.
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Who received the pig heart was the American David Bennett (57), in an operation that lasted seven hours and was considered a success. The patient had end-stage heart disease, so the transplant was a last resort. So that the transplant could happen safely, the pig was genetically modified, eliminating factors that would lead the heart to be rejected by the human organism.
