MONDAY, Jan. 27, 2025 (HealthDay News) — An Alabama woman has become the longest-living recipient of a pig organ transplant, passing 60 days with a gene-edited kidney and showing no signs of slowing down.
“I’m superwoman,” Towana Looney, 53, told The Associated Press as she marked day 61 on Saturday.
Looney’s transplant, performed at NYU Langone Health on Nov. 25, represents a major step forward in the quest to use animal organs to address the critical shortage of human transplants.
Her kidney, taken from a genetically altered pig, is functioning “absolutely normal,” according to Dr. Robert Montgomery, who led the surgery.
“We’re quite optimistic that this is going to continue to work and work well for, you know, a significant period of time,” he told AP.
Looney was discharged from the hospital just 11 days after her surgery and has been recovering in New York for post-transplant care.
Doctors hope she’ll be able to return to her home in Gadsden, Alabama, in about a month.
Looney’s road to kidney failure began with the ultimate gift: In 1999, she donated one of her kidneys to her ailing mother.
However, complications from a pregnancy later on led to a spike in blood pressure that pushed her remaining kidney into kidney failure, explained her doctors at NYU Langone.
By late 2016, Looney was requiring kidney dialysis to survive and a few months later, she was placed on the kidney transplant list. Her candidacy for a human kidney was limited by the high likelihood, in her case, that her immune system would reject a donor organ.
Time was running out, because over the next eight years Looney kept losing accessible blood vessels crucial to supporting dialysis.
Finally, she qualified for the “compassionate use” clause of a U.S. Food and Drug Administration “expanded access” program that involved the experimental use of pig kidneys.
In Looney’s case, the porcine kidney had undergone 10 genetic edits in a bid to make it suitable for transplant into humans.
This type of species-to-species transplant — called xenotransplantation — is still in its infancy, but Looney is in good health, her doctors said.
“It’s a blessing,” she said in a Langone news release. “I feel like I’ve been given another chance at life. I cannot wait to be able to travel again and spend more quality time with my family and grandchildren.”
Looney has embraced her role as an ambassador for xenotransplantation, sharing her journey on social media and encouraging others who are considering similar surgeries.
“I love talking to people, I love helping people,” Looney said. “I want to be, like, some educational piece” for scientists to help others.
Looney’s case is only the third worldwide in which a gene-edited pig kidney has been transplanted into a human, and she is the only person currently living with any type of pig organ. She’s also the only person to receive a pig kidney with 10 separate genetic edits, allowing the organ to function normally within a person.
“Towana represents the culmination of progress we have made in xenotransplantation since we performed the first surgery in 2021,” said Montgomery. “She serves as a beacon of hope to those struggling with kidney failure. All the physicians, researchers, nurses, administrators and perioperative care teams at NYU Langone Health involved in making this moment possible are so thrilled for her, and I couldn’t be more proud of what they have done to improve Towana’s life through this incredible scientific achievement.”
Looney’s first stop on the journey to a pig kidney transplant was back home in Alabama, where she came under the care of Dr. Jayme Locke, an innovative transplant surgeon working at the time at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.
It was Locke who presented Looney as a candidate for the FDA’s expanded-access program. The program allows patients in dire straits the opportunity to undergo xenotransplantation.
Locke’s investigations helped confirm that the gene-edited pig organ would, in fact, work properly within Looney’s body, ensuring that the application was approved.
Montgomery had mentored Locke, and that partnership helped speed the process.
More than 104,000 people across the United States are on the waiting list for an organ transplant, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. Of those, more than 90,000 are waiting for a kidney.
The situation for many is dire: More than 808,000 Americans have end-stage kidney disease, but only 27,000 people were able to receive a new kidney in 2023.
More information
Find out more about organ transplants at the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS).
SOURCE: Associated Press, news release, Jan. 25, 2025; NYU Langone news release, Dec. 17, 2024
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