A 58-year-old man with terminal heart disease has gone under the knife, becoming the second patient to ever receive a pig heart in a complicated, high-risk xenotransplant.

Lawrence Faucette was ineligible for a human heart due to pre-existing peripheral vascular disease and complications with internal bleeding.

The surgery was performed on September 20 by specialists at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) faculty at the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC), where the very first operation of its kind took place on January 7, 2022.

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That historic xenotransplant, however, did not have a happy ending; the recipient, 57-year-old David Bennett, died two months later, not through organ rejection but, what a UMSOM study deemed to be “a complex array of factors.”

Faucette is currently recovering, and his new heart is functioning as it should, without any assistance.

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