Kidney From Pig Transplanted Into Deathly Ill Woman — And Begins Working Almost Immediately
A New Jersey woman is alive and improving after undergoing experimental transplant surgery involving a kidney from a genetically modified pig.
Earlier this month, Lisa Pisano — a 54-year-old grandmother from Cookstown, New Jersey, about 20 miles southeast of Trenton — was practically on death’s doorstep. She was in desperate need of a kidney transplant, but antibodies in her tissues made finding a match nearly impossible.
She was also in heart failure, but because she was on dialysis, doctors hesitated to implant a heart pump known as a left ventricular assist device because of the high mortality rates for dialysis patients undergoing that kind of procedure.
Miserable and seemingly out of options, Pisano suddenly received a message of hope from Dr. Robert Montgomery, the director of NYU Langone Transplant Institute. Montgomery and his team offered to perform two separate procedures that, if successful, would at least buy Pisano some more time with her loved ones. . .
Doctors have dabbled in xenotransplantation — or cross-species organ transplants — for some time, but with little long-term success. Last year, two men received hearts transplanted from pigs at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, but both men died within months. To lessen the chances of organ rejection and improve xenotransplantation possibilities, scientists at United Therapeutics Corp. genetically engineered pigs so that they wouldn’t produce a sugar that the human body does not recognize. (Read more from “Kidney From Pig Transplanted Into Deathly Ill Woman — And Begins Working Almost Immediately” HERE)
