Doctors at NYU Langone Health recently announced a 53-year-old Alabama woman received a pig kidney transplant on Nov. 25 allowing her to avoid dialysis for the first time in eight years, The Associated Press reported.
Towana Looney is the third living person to be given a gene-edited pig organ. Previous patients who received gene-edited pig kidneys were in worse conditions than her and died due to other complications.
“It’s like a new beginning,” Looney told The AP. 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 (animal-to-human) expected to begin next year, says Dr. Robert Montgomery of NYU Langone Health, who helped conduct the surgery.
“To see hope restored to her and her family is extraordinary,” says Dr. Jayme Locke, Looney’s original surgeon who secured Food and Drug Administration permission for the transplant.
Looney had previously donated a kidney to her mother in 1999, but developed high blood pressure during a later pregnancy, which led her remaining kidney to fail. According to the AP report, living donors are given extra priority on the transplant list.
Finding a human organ became impossible due to high antibody levels with tests showing Looney’s body would reject other donors’ kidneys.
Looney was put in contact with Locke who was a transplant surgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Locke filed an FDA application seeking an emergency experiment, under rules for people like Looney who are out of options.
The approval didn’t come right away with the world’s first gene-edited pig kidney transplants going to two sicker patients last spring, at Massachusetts General Hospital and NYU.
The FDA eventually allowed Looney to receive the transplant at NYU, where Locke collaborated with Montgomery.
Montgomery told the AP that moments after sewing the pig kidney into place, it turned a healthy pink and began producing urine.
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.”
Revivicor, based in Blacksburg, Va., provided Looney’s new kidney from a pig with 10 gene alterations. Its parent company, United Therapeutics, says it plans to file an application with the FDA to begin clinical trials with that type of kidney.
Doctors continue to track Looney’s condition, who was initially discharged on Dec. 6. She wears monitors to track her blood pressure, heart rate and other bodily functions.
