A 54-year-old woman from New Jersey has become the second living person to receive a genetically modified pig kidney. The surgery, performed at NYU Langone Health on April 12, also involved transplanting the pig’s thymus to help prevent rejection.
The patient, Lisa Pisano, had a mechanical heart pump implanted days before receiving the transplant. She was facing heart failure and end-stage renal disease and was ineligible for a human organ transplant due to other medical conditions. Her medical team says she is recovering well.
“I feel fantastic,” Pisano said from her hospital bed via Zoom during a news conference Wednesday. “When this opportunity came, I said, ‘I’m going to take advantage of it.’”
It is the first case in which a patient with a mechanical heart pump receives an organ transplant of any type. It is the second known transplant of a genetically modified pig kidney into a living person, and the first with the combined pig thymus.
The series of procedures was performed over a period of nine days. In the first, surgeons implanted the heart pump, a device called a left ventricular assist device, to replace the function of his failing heart. It is used in patients who are waiting for a heart transplant or who are not candidates for a heart transplant. Without it, Pisano’s life expectancy would have been only days or weeks.
PHOTOGRAPHY: JOE CARROTTA FOR NYU LANGONE HEALTH
The second surgery involved transplanting the pig’s organs. Under the kidney cover was placed the animal’s thymus, responsible for educating the immune system. The addition of pork thymus aims to reprogram Pisano’s immune system so that he is less likely to reject the kidney and will hopefully allow doctors to reduce the number of immunosuppressive medications he must take, said Robert Montgomery, director of the Institute. of New York University Langone Transplantation, during the conference. Press conference.
It is the latest attempt to transplant an animal organ into a person (a process known as xenotransplantation) as a potential way to address the organ shortage and offer transplants to people who would not otherwise receive them. In the United States alone there are more than 100,000 people on the national transplant waiting list, and 17 people die every day waiting for an organ. Strict eligibility criteria mean organs are prioritized for relatively healthy patients, leaving patients like Pisano with few options.
Starting in 2021, the New York University team began experimenting with transplanting genetically modified pig hearts and kidneys into deceased humans after brain death. With the consent of their families, the patients were kept connected to a ventilator so that the researchers could evaluate the viability of the pig’s organs. In one case, a pig kidney could function in a human body for up to two months—A record in xenotransplantations. In monkeys, pig kidneys have been shown to function for up to two years. Now, scientists are testing whether they can help humans who need new kidneys.