WASHINGTON (AP) — Pig kidney transplants She has died, along with an implanted device that keeps her heart beating, surgeons announced Tuesday.
Lisa Pisano was near death with kidney and heart failure when surgeons from NYU Langone Health performed two dramatic surgeries in April. The New Jersey woman initially appeared to be recovering well, but about 47 days later, Doctors had to remove the pig’s kidney The heart medication had damaged his organs, so Pisano was put back on dialysis.
Despite dialysis and an implanted heart pump, Pisano eventually entered hospice care and died Sunday, Dr. Robert Montgomery, a transplant surgeon at New York University Langone Hospital, said in a statement.
Montgomery praised Pisano for his courage in taking on the latest experiment to transplant pig organs into humans, a process known as xenotransplantation, which aims to one day fill a critical shortage of transplantable organs.
“Lisa has brought us closer to a future where no one has to die for someone to live,” Montgomery said. “She will be forever remembered for her courage and good character.”
Pisano, 54, told The Associated Press in April that he knew the pig kidneys might not work but “I just took a chance. Worst case scenario, even if it didn’t work for me, it might work for someone else.”
Pisano is the second patient to receive a kidney from a gene-edited pig. Richard “Rick” Suleiman The man died in early May, about two months after undergoing the transplant at Massachusetts General Hospital, with doctors saying he died not from the transplant but from a pre-existing heart condition.
More than 100,000 people are on the transplant waiting list in the United States, most of them people who need kidneys, and thousands die while waiting. Several biotech companies are genetically modifying pigs to make their organs more human-like and less likely to be destroyed by the human immune system.
In addition to experimenting with two pig kidneys, the University of Maryland transplanted pig hearts into two men who had no other options, but both died within months.
Still, doctors hope to use what they learn from these efforts, as well as research using donated cadavers, to launch formal clinical trials in less seriously ill patients sometime next year.
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