'We have combined two marvels of modern medicine': Woman gets pig kidney and heart pump in groundbreaking procedures

In the first medical procedure of its kind, a New Jersey woman received a new heart pump along with a kidney and thymus gland from a pig.

Lisa Pisano, 54, had both heart failure and end-stage kidney disease, the latter of which required regular treatment with dialysis. However, she did not qualify for a traditional combined heart-kidney transplant because she had several chronic conditions that made her a poor candidate. There's a limited supply of human organs, so to qualify for multiple, a person has to meet certain criteria that suggest they'd have a good outcome.

Pisano's doctors at NYU Langone Health began looking into getting her a mechanical heart pump, called a left ventricular assist device (LVAD), which could extend her life. But getting the pump would be very risky while Pisano remained on dialysis, so she'd still have to secure a working kidney. Complicating the matter, the antibodies circulating in Pisano's blood meant she might have to wait years for a human kidney that "matched" her immune system to become available. 

But she didn't have years to wait. "She only had weeks to live," Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, told reporters at a news conference Wednesday (April 24).

Related: 1st partial-heart transplant growing with baby 1 year later

With no human kidney available, Pisano's surgical team instead looked to organs from gene-edited pigs. 

In two procedures conducted over nine days in early April, Pisano received a heart pump and then a pig kidney and a thymus gland. The thymus helps train the body's immune cells, so including the gland should help prevent Pisano's immune system from rejecting the kidney, according to her doctors.