Two months after a pioneering operation, the first person to receive a heart transplant from a pig has died, the US hospital that performed the surgery announced on Wednesday. A handyman by trade, David Bennett, 57, had undergone the experimental procedure in Baltimore, Maryland, after suffering from heart failure and being out of other options. Bennett died on Tuesday, the University of Maryland medical center said, adding that he was able to communicate with his family during his final hours. Senior doctors hailed a “brave man” who had made a big contribution to advancing medical science by taking part in the surgery. The hospital did not provide an exact cause of death but said his condition had worsened in recent days. Bennett’s son, David Bennett Jr, said his father knew the 7 January operation might not work, but was grateful to the medical community for such innovation. He had called the procedure “a miracle”. “We are grateful for every innovative moment, every crazy dream, every sleepless night that went into this historic effort,” David Bennett Jr said in a statement released by the hospital. “We hope this story can be the beginning of hope and not the end.” Bennett had been fast-tracked as a candidate for the unique operation due to the severity of his condition and because he was on life support. He was ineligible for a human heart transplant, and the University of Maryland medical center had called it the “only currently available option for the patient”. On Wednesday the scientific director at the University of Maryland’s animal-to-human transplant program, Dr Muhammad Mohiuddin, paid tribute to Bennett. “Mr Bennett was a brave man. Without his contribution, we couldn’t have done this procedure. He was brave enough to donate his body to science and to accept this pig heart, which many would not. We are grateful to his family who also supported during this long survival of two months. “This is the first time a pig organ has been transplanted in a human and there are lot of unknowns that we can discover after carefully evaluating the dataA lot of new information will come out that will help the field move forward at a faster pace.” The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had granted emergency authorization of the transplant on “compassionate use” grounds seven days before Bennett underwent surgery. “It was either die or do this transplant. I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice,” Bennett said, one the day before the surgery. Doctors for decades have sought to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants. Pigs have long been used in human medicine, including pig skin grafts and implantation of pig heart valves. But transplanting entire organs is much more complex than using highly processed tissue. Prior attempts at such transplants – or xenotransplantation – have failed largely because patients’ bodies rapidly rejected the animal organ. Bennett survived significantly longer with the gene-edited pig heart than one of the last milestones in xenotransplantation - when Baby Fae, a dying California infant, lived 21 days with a baboon’s heart in 1984. This time, scientists had modified the animal to remove pig genes that trigger the hyper-fast rejection and add human genes to help the body accept the organ. At first the pig heart was functioning, and the Maryland hospital issued periodic updates that Bennett seemed to be slowly recovering. Last month, the hospital released video of him watching the Super Bowl from his hospital bed while working with his physical therapist. Organ rejection, infections and other complications are risks for any transplant recipient. “This was a first step into uncharted territory,” said Dr Robert Montgomery of NYU Langone Health, a transplant surgeon who received his own heart transplant. “A tremendous amount of information” will contribute to the next steps as teams at several transplant centers plan the first clinical trials. It was an incredible feat that he was kept alive for two months and was able to enjoy his family,” Montgomery added. One next question is whether scientists have learned enough from Bennett’s experience and some other recent experiments with gene-edited pig organs to persuade the FDA to allow a clinical trial possibly with an organ such as a kidney that is not immediately fatal if it fails. The need for another source of organs is huge. More than 41,000 transplants were performed in the US last year, a record – including about 3,800 heart transplants. But more than 106,000 people remain on the national waiting list, thousands die every year before getting an organ and thousands more never even get added to the list, considered too much of a long shot.