A pair of Filipino conjoined twins have been successfully separated in Saudi Arabia following a surgery that medical teams described as among the most difficult cases they had ever handled.
Klea Ann and Maurice Ann Misa underwent the procedure on April 23 at the King Abdullah Specialized Children’s Hospital in Riyadh, where they had been admitted since their arrival in the kingdom in May 2025 for preparatory examinations.
The Saudi Arabian Embassy in Manila announced Friday that the operation ranked as “one of the most complex cases worldwide,” drawing on the expertise of 30 consultants, specialists, nurses, and technical personnel across disciplines including anesthesia, intensive care, advanced imaging, and plastic surgery.
The procedure came with significant medical risk. Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Rabeeah, who leads the humanitarian program’s medical and surgical team, had placed the odds of success at 50 percent before the operation began — a figure shaped by a convergence of severe complications. The twins shared extensive cerebral venous sinuses and had intertwined brain tissue, with their heads positioned in a way that added further surgical difficulty. Klea Ann carried additional burdens: cardiac muscle insufficiency and advanced kidney failure that had rendered both kidneys nonfunctional.
Lead surgeon Muatasim Al-Zoubi responded to those risks by breaking the procedure into five separate stages.
The operation was conducted under directives from King Salman bin Abdulaziz and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.
Al Rabeeah said the successful separation marks the 70th procedure completed under the Saudi Conjoined Twins Program — a milestone that underscores the scale of the kingdom’s investment in this specialized area of medicine.
The embassy said the twins’ mother waited through eighteen and a half hours before learning the outcome. “After eighteen-and-a-half hours of hope and anticipation, the twins’ mother expressed her profound joy at the success of the separation surgery, which has opened for her daughters the prospect of independent life and renewed hope for the future,” it said.
