For the first time, surgeons at NYU Langone Health have performed a combination of mechanical heart pump and genetically modified pig kidney transplant, helping a 54-year-old woman suffering from heart and kidney failure.
Before the two procedures, which took place earlier this month, Lisa Pisano, a New Jersey native, suffered from heart failure and end-stage kidney disease that required routine dialysis, and she was not candidate for a human transplant.
“I was almost done,” Pisano told CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook, who is also a professor at NYU Langone. “I couldn’t climb the stairs. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t play with my grandchildren. So when this opportunity presented itself to me, I took it.”
Now, she says, she feels “good today compared to other days.”
Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, said she is “doing very well right now” in terms of recovery.
Pisano received only the second known transplant of a genetically modified pig kidney into a living person, and the first to include the pig’s thymus to help prevent rejection, the hospital said. The transplant operation took place on April 12, eight days after the heart pump, called a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD, was implanted on April 4.
Last month, surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston transplanted a pig kidney on Rick Slayman, 62, marking the first successful procedure of its kind in a living human patient anywhere in the world.
Rejection problems with animal-to-human transplants, or xenotransplantation, have led to failures, largely due to people’s immune systems attacking foreign tissue. NOW, scientists use genetic modification to better match these organs to those of humans.
“The human immune system rejects animal organs, but Dr. Montgomery and his team used a pig kidney with an edited gene to make it more compatible,” says LaPook.
Montgomery says it’s not just about the organ itself.
“It’s not just about keeping someone alive, it’s about giving them their life back,” he says.
For Pisano, that means dreaming of playing with her two young grandchildren for the first time in years, she said.
LaPook adds that this procedure was carried out under the FDA’s “compassionate use” protocol. “So it’s not approved yet, but what an incredible technological tour de force,” he said.
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