“He’s lonely, so I just went inside and sat in the stall with him for half an hour, and he liked that because nobody likes to be alone when you’re a herd animal,” she said.
In Palm Springs, California, Carl McNew emailed NYU to ask about volunteering while he’s still fairly healthy.McNew donated a kidney to his husband in 2015 but later his remaining kidney began declining, something very rare in living donors. Medications and intermittent dialysis are helping but McNew knows he’ll eventually need a transplant.
Carl McNew watches television with his husband Steve Hunter in Palm Springs. (AP Photo/Shelby Lum)Carl McNew watches television with his husband Steve Hunter in Palm Springs. (AP Photo/Shelby Lum)“There’s just something about being part of something like that, that is so cutting-edge,” said McNew, who spotted news of NYU’s xenotransplant research in 2023 and emailed his interest.
For Louisville’s Berrios, donor scarcity isn’t the only hurdle. Born with a single kidney that failed in his late 20s, a living donor transplant restored his health for 13 years. But it failed in 2020 and he has since developed antibodies that would destroy another human kidney, what doctors call “highly sensitized.”Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Berrios quietly slips out of his home before dawn to spend nearly four hours tethered to a dialysis machine. Getting the grueling treatments at 5 a.m. is the only way the father of two can both stay alive and hold down a fulltime job.
But dialysis doesn’t fully replace kidney function – people slowly get sicker. So even as Berrios tried an experimental therapy to tamp down his problem antibodies, he told NYU he’s interested in a pig kidney.
FDA rules require that pig organs be extensively tested in monkeys or baboons before humans. And while researchers have extended those primates’ survival to a year, sometimes longer, they were desperate for experience with people. After all, the pig organs are genetically altered to be more humanlike, not more baboon-like.Despite the dialysis and implanted heart pump, Pisano eventually entered hospice care and died Sunday, NYU Langone transplant surgeon Dr. Robert Montgomery said in a statement.
Montgomery praised Pisano’s bravery for attempting the latest pig organ-to-human experiment, what’s called xenotransplantation. The research aims to one day shore up the dire shortage of transplantable organs.“Lisa helped bring us closer to realizing a future where someone does not have to die for another person to live,” Montgomery said. “She will forever be remembered for her courage and good nature.”
Back in April, the 54-year-old Pisano told The Associated Press that she knew the pig kidney might not work but “I just took a chance. And you know, worst case scenario, if it didn’t work for me, it might have worked for someone else.”Pisano was the second patient ever to receive a kidney from a gene-edited pig. The first,