Two months ago, Towana Looney of Alabama had a pig kidney transplanted, and on Saturday, both she and science reached a milestone by becoming the first person to survive more than two months with a pig organ.
– If you saw her on the street, you would never guess that she is the only person in the world who carries a functioning pig organ, says Dr. Robert Montgomery of NYU Langone Health, who performed Looney’s transplant, to the AP.
Problems with the kidney after donation
In 1999, Towana Looney donated a kidney to her mother, but later in life she suffered high blood pressure due to pregnancy complications, which damaged her remaining kidney. In the end, it stopped working, which is very rare among living kidney donors, AP reports.
She spent eight years on dialysis before doctors determined she was unlikely to receive a donated organ, as she had developed high levels of antibodies that were unusually prone to attack another human kidney. In November 2024, she underwent the xenotransplant, but no one knew at the time how a person with such high antibody levels would react.
About three weeks after the operation, she began to show signs of organ rejection, signs that had been learned to recognize thanks to an experiment in 2023 in which a pig kidney functioned for 61 days in the body of a deceased man donated for research.
Dr. Robert Montgomery tells the AP that they successfully treated Looney and that since then there have been no signs of rejection.
Not performed in Sweden
Xenotransplantation is currently not performed in Sweden, but in 2022 published The Swedish Medical Ethics Council (SMER) an opinion on the subject. They wrote: “The future of xenotransplantation is difficult to predict, but it is possible that there will be interest in conducting such research and treatment in Sweden.”
The council also emphasized the importance of pushing research forward, but only in ethically acceptable ways. They highlighted the need for a renewed social debate on xenotransplantation and underlined that an adequate regulatory framework must be in place before any experiments with xenotransplantation can be carried out in Sweden.