A New Jersey woman is alive and improving after undergoing experimental transplant surgery involving a kidney from a genetically modified pig.
Earlier this month, Lisa Pisano — a 54-year-old grandmother from Cookstown, New Jersey, about 20 miles southeast of Trenton — was practically on death’s doorstep. She was in desperate need of a kidney transplant, but antibodies in her tissues made finding a match nearly impossible.
She was also in heart failure, but because she was on dialysis, doctors hesitated to implant a heart pump known as a left ventricular assist device because of the high mortality rates for dialysis patients undergoing that kind of procedure.
Miserable and seemingly out of options, Pisano suddenly received a message of hope from Dr. Robert Montgomery, the director of NYU
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