NYU doctors successfully perform the first-ever combined heart pump and pig kidney transplant

Surgeons at New York University Langone Health performed the first combined mechanical heart pump and gene-edited pig kidney transplant in a 54-year-old woman with heart and kidney failure requiring routine dialysis.

New Jersey native Lisa Pisano was ineligible for a human transplant.

“I was just about done,” Pisano said CBS News. “I couldn’t climb stairs. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t play with my grandchildren. So when this opportunity came along, I took it.”

Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, said she is currently doing “very well” in her recovery.

Pisano’s operation, which took place earlier this month, is only “the second known transplant of a gene-edited pig kidney into a living person,” and “the first to use the pig’s thymus to prevent rejection,” it said. Hopital.

The transplant surgery took place eight days after the heart pump – a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD – was implanted.

This comes a month after surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston transplanted a pig kidney into 62-year-old Rick Slayman, marking the first successful procedure of its kind on a living human patient in the world.

Scientists use genetic modification to better tailor animal organs to humans, to counter rejection problems with animal-to-human transplants or xenotransplantation.

“The human immune system rejects animal organs, but Dr. Montgomery and his team used a pig kidney with one gene modified to make it more compatible,” LaPook explains.

LaPook adds that this procedure was performed according to the Food and Drug Association’s compassionate use protocol.

“So it hasn’t been approved yet, but what an amazing technological feat,” he said.