In unprecedented surgery, woman receives mechanical heart and porcine kidney in the USA

Surgeons at NYU Langone Health, a health unit in New York, announced this Wednesday, 24, that they managed to transplant a pig kidney and a heart pump into a patient for the first time. The woman who received the organs, Lisa Pisano, a 54-year-old New Jersey resident, was undergoing dialysis and had heart failure.

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The procedures were carried out by two different teams over nine days. The first surgery was the heart. A mechanism that emulates the organ was inserted into the patient on April 4, which guaranteed survival for Lisa Pisano, whose doctors expected her to only survive for a few weeks.

However, the application of heart pumps to patients undergoing dialysis results in a high mortality rate. That’s why doctors decided to perform a xenotransplant – when an organ is transferred from one species to another – of a pig kidney.

“It’s a chance to give Lisa a better quality of life and more time to spend with her family,” said Dr. Nader Moazami, head of the Division of Lung and Heart Transplantation at the NYU Grossman School.

The pig kidney inserted into the patient was genetically modified so that it was less likely to be rejected by the human body. The entire procedure required approval from the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration – in translation), which oversees medical services.

According to the hospital, the woman could not receive normal organs due to chronic medical conditions that reduced the chances of success.