Baboon-Liver Recipient Dies After Stroke

A man who received a baboon’s liver in the first such animal-to-human transplant died late Sunday after suffering a stroke and lapsing into a coma, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center reported.

Dr. Howard R. Doyle of the Pitt transplant team said doctors were trying to wean the 35-year-old man from a respirator Sunday afternoon when they discovered the man’s brain was bleeding.

The man suffered a stroke, and nearly seven hours later he was pronounced dead of intracranial bleeding. Doctors didn’t immediately know what caused the bleeding, he said.

“It all happened very quickly,” Doyle said.

The man, whose name has been withheld at his request, received the historic transplant during an 11-hour operation on June 28.

He suffered from hepatitis B, which was destroying his own liver and likely would have attacked any transplanted human liver, doctors said.

Until the last week of August, he appeared to be recovering well.

On July 3, doctors upgraded his condition to serious, and then to fair on July 28. He suffered a minor bout with rejection in mid-July but doctors controlled it with steroids.

The man’s condition started to slide about Aug. 25, when a fever sent him back to the hospital’s intensive-care unit.

Within a week, his condition had been downgraded twice to critical, and since Tuesday he had been on a respirator because of an infection that impaired his liver’s function. High doses of antibiotics kept the infection from getting worse but failed to cure it.

Doctors believe the man developed sepsis, a blood infection, after dye was injected into his bile duct Aug. 28 for an X-ray, possibly introducing a bacteria.