Alabama Woman Becomes The World's Longest Living Recipient of Pig Organ Transplant

A 53-year-old woman from Alabama has passed a major milestone this week to become the longest-living recipient of a pig organ transplant—healthy with her new kidney for 61 days. “I’m superwoman,” Towana Looney told The Associated Press, laughing about outpacing family members on long walks around New York City as she recovers. “It’s a new take on life.”

According to doctors, Looney’s recovery is a morale boost in the quest to make animal-to-human transplants a reality. In the past, only four others have received hugely experimental transplants of gene-edited pig organs—two hearts and two kidneys. However, none lived for more than two months.

“If you saw her on the street, you would have no idea that she’s the only person in the world walking around with a pig organ inside them that’s functioning,” said Dr. Robert Montgomery of NYU Langone Health, who led Looney’s transplant.

According to Dr. Montgomery, Looney’s kidney is working normally. Doctors hope she can now go back to Gadsden in Alabama from New York, where she has been temporarily living for post-transplant checkups, within a month. “We’re quite optimistic that this is going to continue to work and work well for, you know, a significant period of time,” he said.

Scientists are now genetically altering pig organs to make them more human-like and address the severe shortage of transplantable human organs. Experts say more than 1,00,000 people are on the transplant list—most who need a kidney.

The Food and Drug Administration allows animal organ transplants only for compassionate use cases, only in special circumstances for those out of other options.

Also known as xenotransplantation, a few hospitals are trying to conduct surgeries with information about what worked and what did not. Experts say formal studies on this are expected to begin sometime this year. United Therapeutics, which supplied Looney’s kidney, recently asked the FDA for permission to begin a trial.

Looney donated a kidney to her mother in 1999, but a few pregnancy complications later led to high blood pressure that damaged her remaining kidney. It failed eventually—something doctors say is rare among living donors. She spent eight years on dialysis before doctors concluded she would never get a donated organ—she'd developed super-high levels of antibodies abnormally primed to attack another human kidney.

So then, Looney sought out the pig experiment. No one knew how it would work in someone highly sensitive to those overactive antibodies.

Discharged just 11 days after her surgery last November, Montgomery’s team has closely tracked Looney's recovery through blood tests and other measurements. About three weeks after the transplant, they caught subtle signs that rejection was beginning—signs they learnt to look for thanks to a 2023 experiment when a pig kidney worked for 61 days inside a deceased man whose body was donated for research.

Dr. Montgomery said they successfully treated Looney and there has been no sign of rejection since—and a few weeks ago she also met the family behind that deceased body research.

According to Dr. Montgomery, there is no way to predict how long Looney’s new kidney will work but if it were to fail, she could receive dialysis again. “The truth is we don’t know what the next hurdles are because this is the first time we’ve gotten this far,” Montgomery said. “We’ll have to continue to keep a close eye on her.”

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