In yet another sign of xenotransplantation creeping toward reality, a medical team at NYU Langone Health announced Tuesday that, for the third time, a kidney from a genetically modified pig had been transplanted into a living patient.
Surgeons performed the procedure over seven hours on November 25. The organ recipient, a 53-year-old woman named Towana Looney, is a resident of Alabama who has been on a waiting list for a kidney since 2017. In the late 1990s, Looney had donated a kidney to her mother. Years later, her remaining kidney began to fail after suffering damage from high blood pressure caused by a complication from pregnancy. High levels of antibodies in her blood made finding a matched organ donor highly unlikely.