WASHINGTON — A woman who received a pig kidney transplant and also had an implanted device to keep her heart beating has died, her surgeon said Tuesday.
Lisa Pisano was near death with kidney and heart failure when surgeons at NYU Langone Health performed two dramatic operations in April.
The New Jersey woman initially appeared to be recovering well, but about 47 days later, her heart medication had damaged her organs, forcing doctors to remove the pig’s kidney and put Pisano back on dialysis.
Despite dialysis and a heart pump implant, 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 trying the latest pig-organ-to-human experiment, known as xenotransplantation.
The research aims to one day fill the 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.
first, Richard “Rick” Suleiman He underwent transplant surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and died in early May, about two months later.
Doctors said he died not as a result of the transplant but due to a pre-existing heart condition.
There are more than 100,000 people on the U.S. transplant waiting list, most of them people in need of a kidney, and thousands of them die while waiting.
Some biotech companies are genetically modifying pig organs to make them 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.
