WASHINGTON — The woman who had a pig kidney transplant and a device put in her heart to keep it beating has died, her surgeon said Tuesday.
Lisa Pisano was very close to dying from kidney and heart failure when the two major surgeries at NYU Langone Health happened in April. At first, the woman from New Jersey seemed to be getting better, but 47 days later, doctors had to take out the pig kidney and put Pisano back on dialysis because her heart medicines had hurt the organ.
Pisano finally went into hospice care and died Sunday, even though she was on dialysis and had a heart pump implanted, said Dr. Robert Montgomery, a transplant surgeon at NYU Langone.
Montgomery praised Pisano for being brave for trying xenotransplantation, the latest experiment in which pig organs are transplanted into humans. The goal of the study is to one day make up for the terrible lack of organs that can be transplanted.
According to Montgomery, Lisa helped make it more likely that one person would not have to die so that another could live. “People will always remember how brave and nice she was.”
Pisano, who is 54 years old, told The Associated Press in April that she knew the pig kidney might not work, but she “took a chance.” If all else fails, it might have worked for someone else even though it didn’t work for me.
Pisano was the second person in history to get a kidney from a pig whose genes had been changed. The first guy, Richard “Rick” Slayman, got his transplant at Massachusetts General Hospital. He died in early May, almost two months after getting it. His doctor said that he died of heart disease that was already there, not because of the graft.
People in the U.S. who need a donation make up more than 100,000 on the waiting list, and every year, thousands of them die. Several biotech companies are changing the genes of pigs to make their organs more like those in humans, which means that people’s immune systems are less likely to destroy them.
Along with the two kidney tests on pigs, the University of Maryland also transplanted pig hearts into two men who had no other choice. Both men died within months.
Still, doctors hope to start real clinical trials with patients who aren’t as sick next year based on what they learned from those failed attempts and studies done on donated bodies.