Pig hearts beat for three days inside the chests of two brain-dead patients who were kept alive using ventilators. The feat helps researchers prepare for future clinical trials of pig-to-human transplants, surgeons at the NYU Langone Health in New York City announced at a news conference on July 12.
In mid-June, surgeons transplanted a heart from a genetically modified pig into Lawrence Kelly — a 72-year-old Vietnam veteran with a history of heart problems. A second patient received a porcine heart on July 6. The team monitored both patients for 72 hours before taking them off life support.
For those three days, the hearts kept the recently deceased patients’ blood flowing. “We learned a tremendous amount from the first operation,” surgeon Nader Moazami said at the news conference. The new heart was too small for Kelly’s chest. So surgeons had to adjust blood vessels to account for the size mismatch and blood flow wasn’t perfect.
Last year, another team at NYU Langone Health transplanted a pig kidney into a brain-dead woman ( SN: 10/22/21 ). The first pig-to-human heart transplant happened in a living patient in January: 57-year-old David Bennet survived two months with a pig heart before dying of heart failure ( SN: 1/31/22 ). All the organs had been genetically modified to avoid immediate rejection by the body and make them safe for people.
It’s unclear why Bennet’s new heart ultimately failed . Transplanting organs into brain-dead people allows for in-depth analyses that aren’t possible in living patients, NYU Langone surgeon Robert Montgomery said. Researchers can take tissue samples and pictures of the organ immediately following the procedure, while the focus for living people is on keeping them alive and comfortable.
Next, the team plans to do longer-term transplants in more brain-dead patients to determine how long pig hearts might last.
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Erin I. Garcia de Jesus is a staff writer at Science News . She holds a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Washington and a master’s in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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NEW YORK, July 7, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Bernstein Liebhard LLP announces that a securities class action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of investors who purchased or acquired the securities of Unity Software Inc. (“Unity” or the “Company”) (NYSE: U) between March 5, 2021 and May 10, 2022, inclusive (the “Class Period”). The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California and alleges violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.
Unity creates and operates an interactive real-time 3D content platform. The Company’s platform provides software solutions to create, run, and monetize interactive, real-time 2D and 3D content for mobile phones, tablets, PCs, consoles, and augmented and virtual reality devices. One of the tools on the Company’s product platform is the Audience Pinpointer, a user acquisition service which uses real-time user valuation at the time of an ad request.
Plaintiff alleges that Defendants made materially false and misleading statements throughout the Class Period. Specifically, Plaintiff alleges that Defendants failed to disclose that: (i) deficiencies in Unity’s product platform reduced the accuracy of the Company’s machine learning technology; (ii) the foregoing was likely to have a material negative impact on the Company’s revenues; (iii) accordingly, Unity had overstated the Company’s commercial and/or financial prospects for 2022; and (iv) as a result, the Company was likely to have to reduce its fiscal 2022 guidance.
On May 10, 2022, after the market closed, Unity announced its financial results for the first quarter of 2022. The Company also reduced its fiscal 2022 guidance, citing “challenges with monetization products.” Specifically, Unity stated that “a fault in [Unity’s] platform . . . resulted in reduced accuracy for [its] Audience Pinpointer tool, a revenue expensive issue given that [the] Pinpointer tool experienced significant growth post the IDFA changes.”
On this news, the Company’s stock price fell $17.83 per share to close at $30.30 per share on May 11, 2022.
If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than September 5, 2022. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation. Your ability to share in any recovery doesn’t require that you serve as lead plaintiff. If you choose to take no action, you may remain an absent class member.
Since 1993, Bernstein Liebhard LLP has recovered over $3.5 billion for its clients. In addition to representing individual investors, the Firm has been retained by some of the largest public and private pension funds in the country to monitor their assets and pursue litigation on their behalf. As a result of its success litigating hundreds of lawsuits and class actions, the Firm has been named to The National Law Journal’s “Plaintiffs’ Hot List” thirteen times and listed in The Legal 500 for ten consecutive years.
