Partial Heart Transplants Show Promise

Well|Doctors Find Early Success With Partial Heart Transplants

Owen Monroe was born blue. The arteries in his heart that transport blood to the lungs and the rest of the body were fused together, leaving only a single, faulty pipeline. Within a few hours, he was in end-stage heart failure, with 20 to 30 intravenous medications barely keeping him alive.

To treat his heart defect, known as truncus arteriosus, doctors usually need to perform a risky surgery. Almost half of infants die within a month of this operation, and two-thirds are dead within a year.

So, Dr. Joseph Turek, the chief of pediatric cardiac surgery at Duke University Medical Center, proposed a partial heart transplant, which would use valves, arteries, veins and muscle from a donor heart to repair Owen’s own.

“I asked him, ‘How’s it gone before? How many have you done?’” recounted Tayler Monroe, Owen’s mother. “He said, ‘Well, I’ve done it on five piglets.’”

Ms. Monroe and her husband, Nick, agreed. On April 22, 2022, after eight hours of surgery, Dr. Turek completed the first successful partial heart transplant on Owen, who was just 17 days old at the time, his heart the size of a strawberry.

Owen is one of fewer than 50 people who has undergone this operation, a new way to repair various life-threatening heart defects with living tissue. Most have taken place at Duke, and a new study, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, offers the first systematic analysis of partial heart transplants, tracking Owen and 18 other patients who range from two days old to their early 30s.