A woman from Alabama spent an important milestone on Saturday to become the oldest receiver of a pork organ transplant, healthy and full of energy with her new kidney for 61 days and telling.
“I’m Superwoman,” Towana Looney told The Associated Press, laughing to overcome family members in long walks through New York City while continuing her recovery. “It is a new version of life.”
Looney’s vibrant recovery is a moral impulse in the search to realize animal to humans. Only four other Americans have received very experimental transplants from pig organs edited by genes, two hearts and two kidneys, and none lived more than two months.
“If you saw her on the street, you would have no idea that she is the only person in the world who walks with a pig organ inside them that works,” said Dr. Robert Montgomery of Nyu Langone Health, who directed the transplant From Looney.
Montgomery described the renal function of “absolutely normal” Looney. Doctors expect that I can leave New York, where it lives temporarily for the checks after transplantation, for their home in Gadsden, Alabama, at home in approximately another month.
“We are quite optimistic that this will continue to function and work well, you know, a significant period of time,” he said.
Scientists are genetically altering pigs, so their organs are more human to address a serious shortage of transplantable human organs. More than 100,000 people are on the US transplants list., The majority who need a kidney and thousands die.
Pork organ transplants so far have been cases of “compassionate use”, experiences the food and medicines administration that allows only special circumstances out of other options.
And the handful of hospitals that try them are sharing information about what worked and what not, in preparation for the world’s first formal studies on xenotransplantation, is expected to begin at some point in this year. United Therapeutics, which supplied Looney’s kidney, recently requested permission from the Food and Medicines Administration to start a trial.
The way Looney Rates is “very precious experience,” said Dr. Tatsuo Kawai of the Massachusetts General Hospital, who directed the first pork kidney transplant in the world last year and works with another pig developer, and genesis.
Looney was much healthier than previous patients, Kawai said, so his progress will help inform the next attempts. “We have to learn from each other,” he said.
Looney donated a kidney to his mother in 1999. Later, pregnancy complications caused high blood pressure that damaged his remaining kidney, which finally failed, something incredibly weird among living donors. He spent eight years on dialysis before doctors conclude that he would never get a donated organ: he had developed super high levels of abnormally prepared antibodies to attack another human kidney.
Then Looney, 53, looked for the pork experiment. No one knew how it would work in someone “highly sensitized” with those hyperactive antibodies.
From the nesting only 11 days after the surgery of November 25, the Montgomery team has closely tracked its recovery through blood analysis and other measurements. Approximately three weeks after the transplant, they captured subtle signs that the rejection was starting, signs that they had learned to search thanks to a 2023 experiment when a pork kidney worked for 61 days inside a deceased man whose body was donated for the investigation.
Montgomery said they successfully treated Looney and that there have been no signs of rejection since then, and a few weeks ago he met the family behind that investigation of the deceased body.
“It feels really good to know that the decision I made for Nyu to use my brother was the right decision and is helping people,” said Mary Miller-Duffy, from Newburgh, New York.
Looney in turn is trying to help others, serving as what Montgomery calls an ambassador for people who have been contacting through social networks, sharing their anguish in the long wait for transplants and wondering about the kidneys of pig.
One, he said, was being considered for a xenotransplant in another hospital, but he was afraid, wondering whether to proceed.
“I didn’t want to persuade him whether or not to do it,” Looney said. Instead, she asked him if he was religious and urged him to pray, to “get out of your faith, what your heart tells you.”
“I love talking to people, I love to help people,” he added. “I want to be, as, an educational piece” for scientists to help others.
There is no way to predict how long the new kidney of Looney will work, but if it will fail, you could receive dialysis again.
“The truth is that we really don’t know what the next obstacles are because this is the first time we get so far,” said Montgomery. “We will have to keep watching closely.”
