On Sunday, Lisa Pisano, a 54-year-old New Jersey woman passed away after spending forty-seven days with a pig kidney genetically modified and transplanted into her body. She was the second patient to receive this transplant and was very sick as she had both kidney and heart failure.
Within eight days, Pisano got a mechanical heart pump before the transplantation procedure on April 12.
This happened when the pig kidney got spoilt due to insufficient blood supply from the artificial heart pump making it impossible for physicians to detach it on May 29th. Thereafter, following the explantation, she resumed dialysis but later was made comfortable in hospice care. As such, Pisano’s case deviated because typically patients with kidney failure are not eligible for heart pumps owing to the high risk of mortality of .
“The loss of Lisa is an enormous one”, said Dr Robert Montgomery who works at NYU Langone Transplant Institute. “No exaggeration can capture what Lisa has done for medicine, surgery and xenotransplantation. She gave thousands of people living with end-stage kidney or heart failure hope that they could soon have another source of organs.”
Her case came after Richard Slayman’s; he is 62 years old and received a kidney from a genetically engineered pig at Mass General Brigham in Boston in March. Like Pisano he had complex medical issues but despite being well enough to go home two weeks later he died within just two months.
The procedures are still experimental though there have been notable advances in xenotransplantation recently. Only patients who cannot get human organs because they are too ill and will die without treatment have qualified for animal organ transplantations.
In America where over 100,000 individuals are waiting for organ transplants mainly kidneys biotech firms are trying hard to handle this devastating lack of transplantable organs that prevail there killing many including patients prior to their transplantation; these companies concentrate on manipulating the genetic makeup of pigs so that their organs resemble human ones more closely and are subjected to less rejection by the body’s immune system.
