US woman, 53, is world’s only healthy person with genetically modified pig organ transplant

A 53-year-old woman from the US state of Alabama has a new lease on life after receiving a gene-edited kidney obtained from a pig, living healthily with the new organ for over a month, her New York City doctors announced Tuesday, HealthDay News reports.

Towana 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. But her candidacy for a human kidney was limited by the high likelihood, in her case, that her immune system would reject the donor's organ.

Time was running out, because over the next eight years Looney kept losing blood vessels crucial to supporting dialysis.

Finally, she qualified for the "compassionate use" clause of a US Food and Drug Administration "expanded access" program that involved the experimental use of pig kidneys.

This type of species-to-species transplant—called xenotransplantation—is still in its infancy, but a month after her transplant, Looney is in good health, her doctors said.

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.

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