For the first time in the history of medical science, a team of doctors in the US has successfully implanted a pig’s heart into a human being. This breakthrough development has been made possible by a Pakistani-American doctor, Dr. Mansoor Mohiuddin.
A 57-year-old heart patient named David Bennett had initially been declared ineligible for a normal human heart transplant due to extremely poor health. It was then that he contacted Dr. Mansoor who has been conducting research on xenotransplantation for several years. Xenotransplantation is a medical procedure that involves the transplanting of organs between different species.
With xenotransplantation appearing as the only hope of saving Bennett’s life, Dr. Mansoor along with a team of doctors of the University of Maryland applied for a special permit from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to perform the procedure for the first time ever.
According to details, the team of doctors led by Dr. Mansoor performed the operation in a hospital located in Baltimore last week. While the procedure took seven hours to complete, David Bennett is in a stable condition and now recovering under special care.
Each day, hundreds of patients in need of organ transplants die waiting due to an acute shortage of organs in the global market. Dr. Mansoor’s efforts have given a ray of hope to millions of such patients around the world.
Speaking in this regard, Dr. Mansoor Mohiuddin said that he has been researching about transplanting genetically modified organs, including heart, between species for several years. He has conducted experiments on transplanting hearts of different animals, including monkeys, into humans but that did not work.
His research showed that a pig’s heart comes closest to a human heart and this is why he selected to perform more experiments on a pig’s heart to genetically modify it and transplant it into a human being.
Dr. Mansoor Mohiuddin is a graduate of Dow Medical College Karachi. He completed his MBBS (MD) degree in 1989 and worked at Civil Hospital Karachi for two years from 1990 to 1991 before moving to the US a year later.
He completed fellowships in Transplantation Biology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1993 to 1998, Bone Marrow Transplantation at the Drexel University in Philadelphia from 1997 to 1998, and Human Islet Transplantation at the University of Pennsylvania from 2003 to 2005.
Dr. Mansoor has been conducting research in xenotransplantation since 1992 and has been instrumental in launching several initiatives to find a breakthrough treatment for transplanting organs between different species.
He has more than 120 publications, 100 abstracts, and numerous presentations in the fields of transplantation and xenotransplantation to his name.