Towana Looney, a 53-year-old American whose only kidney was no longer functional, became in November the third living person in the world to benefit from a pig kidney, a practice that is still very experimental, a team announced on Tuesday American scientist.
“I feel like I’ve been given a second chance in life,” greeted the patient in a press release, three weeks after the operation.
Towana Looney donated one of her kidneys to her mother in 1999 and lived on dialysis for eight years after a pregnancy complication damaged her remaining kidney.
This American woman living in Alabama had been waiting for a transplant since 2017 and could not find a compatible donor. Her medical condition was deteriorating, and on November 25 at NYU Langone Hospital in New York, a pioneer in the field, she benefited from a genetically modified pig kidney so that the organ would not be immediately rejected by the human body. .
“This operation constitutes the latest promising advance in an emerging surgical practice presented as the solution to the organ supply crisis,” welcomed the medical team. This type of transplantation called xenograft, between animal and human, nourishes the hope of responding to the chronic shortage of organ donations in a country where more than 100,000 patients are on the waiting list, including more than 90,000 for a kidney.
Several xenografts have been carried out by this team in recent years, including the world first of a transplant of a pig kidney on a brain dead patient, in September 2021. The organ then functioned well for a few days.
It was one of the pigs from a Virginia laboratory farm that provided Towana Looney’s transplanted kidney. The pigs are genetically modified there to one day sell their organs for up to a million dollars to human patients who need them.
NYU Langone Hospital in New York then transplanted pig kidneys into two other living but seriously ill patients, Rick Slayman and Lisa Pisano, in 2024. They died a few weeks later, but the transplanted organs were not immediately rejected by the patients’ bodies.
Another American scientific team carried out in 2022 the world’s first transplant of a porcine heart into a living human. But the man, operated on by surgeons from the University of Maryland, died two months after his operation. A second was transplanted in September 2023, but died in November of the same year.
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