On January 7, doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine transplanted the heart of a genetically engineered pig into a 57-year-old patient named David Bennett. Everything was fine, but on March 8 it became known about the death of a man. A statement released by the university in March said that “no apparent cause had been identified at the time of his death.” As it turned out later, the donor organ of the animal was affected by porcine cytomegalovirus.

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According to the MIT Technology Review, the possible presence of this swine virus and the desperate effort to defeat it were described by transplant surgeon Bartley Griffith of the University of Maryland School of Medicine during a webinar broadcast online by the American Transplant Society on April 20. This issue is now the subject of much discussion among specialists, who believe that it was the infection that was the potential cause of Bennett’s death and that the heart did not last longer.

The heart replacement in Maryland was a major challenge for xenotransplantation, the process of transplanting tissues and organs between different species. Special pigs bred for organ production were supposed to be virus-free. The biotech company Revivicor, which raised the pigs, declined to comment and made no public statements about the virus.