A Surprising Way To Make More Hearts Available For Transplants: Use Diseased Organs

FOR TWO LONG YEARS, TOM GIANGIULIO JR., 58, WAS ON THE national waiting list for a heart transplant. He had cardiomyopathy, a condition that can weaken the heart muscle, and although he’d taken medication and had surgery to fix the problem, his doctors said there wasn’t much more they could do. He would have to wait for a new heart—and hope that he wouldn’t become one of the 20 Americans to die every day while waiting for a transplant.

- Alexandra Sifferlin

“You wake up every morning and wonder if you’re going to be around to go to sleep at night,” says Giangiulio, who lives in Waterford Works, N.J. “It’s like looking into the tunnel, and there’s no light on the other end.”

At a doctor’s appointment at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia, Giangiulio was approached with an unconventional offer: Would he be open to enrolling in a clinical trial that could get him a new heart faster, but would require him to be—hopefully briefly—infected with the deadly virus hepatitis C?

Each year in the U.S., about 1,000 donor hearts get discarded because of the infection, which spreads through the bloodstream to the organs. But the disease can now be cured. In the past few years, several new, highly effective drugs for hepatitis C have been federally approved, and they’ve been shown to clear hepatitis C up to 98% of the time.