Decades After Donating Kidney, She Gets One From a Pig

An Alabama woman is recovering well after a pig kidney transplant last month that freed her from eight years of dialysis, the latest effort to save human lives with animal organs, reports the AP. Towana Looney is the fifth American given a gene-edited pig organ—and notably, she isn't as sick as prior recipients who died within two months of receiving a pig kidney or heart. "It's like a new beginning," says Looney, 53. Right away, "the energy I had was amazing. To have a working kidney—and to feel it—is unbelievable." Looney's surgery marks an important step as scientists get ready for formal studies of xenotransplantation expected to begin next year, said Dr. Robert Montgomery of NYU Langone Health, who led the highly experimental procedure.

Looney is recuperating well after her transplant, which was announced Tuesday. She was discharged from the hospital just 11 days after surgery to continue recovery in a nearby apartment, although temporarily readmitted this week to adjust her medications. Doctors expect her to return home to Alabama in three months. If the pig kidney were to fail, she could begin dialysis again. "To see hope restored to her and her family is extraordinary," said Dr. Jayme Locke, Looney's original surgeon who secured FDA permission for the Nov. 25 transplant. More than 100,000 people are on the US transplant list, most who need a kidney. Thousands die waiting and many more who need a transplant never qualify. Now, searching for an alternate supply, scientists are genetically altering pigs so their organs are more humanlike.

Looney donated a kidney to her mother in 1999. Later a complication during pregnancy caused high blood pressure that damaged her remaining kidney, which eventually failed. It's incredibly rare for living donors to develop kidney failure although those who do are given extra priority on the transplant list. But Looney couldn't get a match—she had developed antibodies abnormally primed to attack another human kidney. Tests showed she'd reject every kidney donors have offered. Then Looney heard about pig kidney research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and told Locke, at the time a UAB transplant surgeon, she'd like to try one. Even if her new organ fails, doctors can learn from it, Looney told the AP: "You don't know if it's going to work or not until you try." (More xenotransplantation stories.)