A woman gets a kidney transplant from a pig and then walks out of the hospital days later, saying, Second chance
A woman from Alabama got a gene-edited pig kidney donation at NYU Langone Health and it worked.
This was the seventh time that doctors at NYU Langone did an organ transplant on a pig.
Lucky for Towana Looney, 53, she was able to leave the hospital just a few days after the surgery.
Looney told the press at an NYU Langone event that he was “overjoyed” and “blessed to have received this gift—a second chance at life.”
“I want to give courage to those out there on dialysis,” she stated.
On Wednesday, Dr. Marc Siegel, a senior medical expert for Fox News and a clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone, joined “America Reports” to talk about how this should give people hope for the future of transplant medicine.
“We have a great shortage of body organs,” he stated. “There will still be a big shortage even if people donate…” We need to do something “
“We can bio-engineer them, or we can use them from other species, [which is] called xenotransplant.”
Siegel praised Looney’s “incredible” journey, which began 25 years ago when she gave her mother her own kidney.
Siegel says that Looney then had a rare problem while she was pregnant that caused her kidneys to stop working.
Doctor Robert Montgomery, who runs the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, called Looney a “hero” in a different interview with Siegel.
“She gave the gift of life to her mother,” he noted. “She’s someone who already paid a significant price for an incredible act of generosity.”
“She is looking for any other possibility, any other chance, at having a normal life again.”
He told Looney that he thinks he will “change the face of transplantation.”
Siegel says that Montgomery knows how hard it is to wait for a given organ because he had a heart transplant after surviving 30 heart attacks.
Montgomery said, “My epiphany was that we needed another source of organs: living through that and realizing that I probably wouldn’t live through it.” She added that “far less” than 1% of people who die every year are eligible to be organ donors.
“At the same time, the number of people who can benefit from an organ transplant continues to increase,” he said.
Siegel stated that “this one worked” so well that Looney was able to leave the hospital. This is the seventh pig organ transplant that has been done at NYU Langone.
Montgomery informed Siegel that this was because 10 DNA changes had been made to the kidney.
The doctor says that now it’s “key” to work on immunology to help make sure that Looney’s immune system doesn’t reject the kidney.
“That’s why going forward, in the future, this is going to be a big deal when we get past the rejections,” Siegel said.
Siegel says that out of the 100,000 people who wait for an organ donation every year, 80,000 are waiting for kidneys. People could also be waiting for hearts and livers.
“This is the future,” he said.
Bioengineered organs that are made in a lab are “much farther away” from being available than xenotransplantation, which Montgomery said is “right in front of us now.”
Source: Woman receives pig kidney transplant, walks out of hospital days later: ‘Second chance’
