Woman celebrates 2 months with pig kidney transplant
An Alabama woman passed a major milestone on Saturday to become the longest living recipient of a pig organ transplant.
“I’m superwoman,” Towana Looney, 53, said after 61 days and counting with her new kidney.
Her vibrant recovery is a morale boost in the quest to make animal-to-human transplants a reality. Only four other Americans have received hugely experimental transplants of gene-edited pig organs, and none lived more than two months.
More than 100,000 people are on the US transplant list—with most needing a kidney as thousands die waiting.
Looney donated a kidney to her mother in 1999. Later pregnancy complications caused high blood pressure that damaged her remaining kidney, which eventually failed—something incredibly rare among living donors.
She spent eight years on dialysis and had developed very high levels of antibodies abnormally primed to attack another human kidney.
So Looney sought out the procedure. After initial signs of rejection, she was successfully treated, said Dr. Robert Montgomery of NYU Langone Health, who led the transplant.
There’s no way to predict how long her new kidney will work. But he said “We’re quite optimistic that this is going to…work well for, you know, a significant period of time.”
