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Doctors Combined a Heart Pump and Pig Kidney Transplant in Breakthrough Surgery
In the first procedure of its kind, a 54-year-old New Jersey woman received a genetically engineered pig kidney and thymus after getting a heart pump.
The addition of the pig thymus is meant to reprogram Pisano’s immune system to be less likely to reject the kidney and hopefully allow doctors to reduce the amount of immunosuppressive drugs she has to take, said Robert Montgomery, director of NYU Langone’s Transplant Institute, during the press conference. Starting in 2021, the NYU team began experimenting with transplanting genetically engineered pig hearts and kidneys into deceased humans following brain death. The major hurdle with xenotransplantation is overcoming rejection, which occurs when the transplant recipient’s immune system recognizes the donor organ as foreign and starts attacking it.
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