NEW YORK — Doctors transplanted a pig kidney into a dying New Jersey woman, part of a dramatic pair of surgeries that also stabilized her failing heart.
Lisa Pisano’s combination of heart and kidney failure left her too sick to qualify for a traditional transplant and without options. So doctors at NYU Langone Health created a new one-two punch: implanting a mechanical pump to keep his heart beating and, days later, transplanting a kidney from a genetically modified pig.
Pisano is recovering well, the NYU team announced Wednesday. She is only the second patient to receive a pig kidney – following a historic transplant last month at Massachusetts General Hospital – and the latest in a series of attempts to make animal-to-human transplantation a reality.
This week, the 54-year-old grabbed a walker and took her first steps.
“I was on edge,” Pisano told the Associated Press. “I just jumped at the opportunity. And you know, worst case scenario, if it didn’t work for me, it could have worked for someone else and it could have helped the next person.”
Robert Montgomery, director of NYU’s Langone Transplant Institute, recounted applause in the operating room as the organ immediately began producing urine.
“It’s been transformative,” Montgomery said of the experiment’s early results.
But “we are not out of the woods yet,” warned Dr. Nader Moazami, the NYU heart surgeon who implanted the heart pump.
“With this surgery I can see my wife smile again,” Pisano’s husband, Todd, said Wednesday.
Other transplant specialists are closely watching the patient’s progress.
“I have to congratulate them,” said Dr. Tatsuo Kawai of Mass General, who noted that his own pig kidney patient was healthier at the start of the operation than the NYU patient. Kidney transplantation.”
More than 100,000 people are on the transplant waiting list in the US, most need a kidney, and thousands die waiting. Hoping to address the shortage of donated organs, several biotechnology companies are genetically modifying pigs so that their organs are more human-like and less likely to be destroyed by people’s immune systems.
NYU and other research teams have temporarily transplanted pig kidneys and hearts into brain-dead bodies, with promising results. So the University of Maryland transplanted pig hearts into two men who had no other options, and both died within months.
Mass General’s pig kidney transplant last month raised new hopes. Kawai said Richard “Rick” Slayman went through an early rejection scare but recovered enough to return home earlier this month and is still doing well five weeks after the transplant. A recent biopsy showed no further problems.
Pisano is the first woman to receive a pig organ – and, unlike previous xenotransplant experiments, both the heart and kidneys failed. She went into cardiac arrest and had to be resuscitated before experimental surgeries. She became too weak even to play with her grandchildren. “I was unhappy,” said the Cookstown, New Jersey, woman.
Heart failure made her ineligible for a traditional kidney transplant. But while on dialysis, she also didn’t qualify for a heart pump, called a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD.
“It’s like being in a maze and not being able to find a way out,” Montgomery explained – until surgeons decided to pair a heart pump with a pig kidney.
With emergency permission from the Food and Drug Administration, Montgomery chose an organ from a pig genetically modified by United Therapeutics Corp. so that its cells do not produce a specific sugar that is foreign to the human body and causes immediate rejection of the organ.
One more tweak: The donor pig’s thymus gland, which trains the immune system, was attached to the donated kidney in hopes of helping Pisano’s body tolerate the new organ.
Surgeons implanted the LVAD to power Pisano’s heart on April 4 and transplanted the pig kidney on April 12. There’s no way to predict her long-term outcome, but she hasn’t shown any signs of organ rejection so far, Montgomery said. And by adjusting the LVAD to work with his new kidney, Moazami said doctors have already learned lessons that could help in the future treatment of heart and kidney patients.
Special “compassionate use” experiments teach doctors a lot, but rigorous studies will be needed to prove whether xenotransplants really work. What happens with Pisano and Mass General’s kidney recipient will undoubtedly influence the FDA’s decision to allow such trials. United Therapeutics said it hopes to start one next year.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. AP is solely responsible for all content.
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
