The only person in the world with a functioning pig organ is successful after a record time of two months

An Alabama woman reached a major milestone Saturday, becoming the longest-living porcine organ transplant recipient — healthy and energetic with her new kidney for 61 days and counting.

“I’m a superwoman,” Towana Looney told The Associated Press, laughing about how she left her family members behind on long walks through New York City during her recovery. “It’s a new way of looking at life.”

Looney’s rapid recovery is a morale boost in his quest to make animal-to-human transplants a reality. Only four other Americans received large-scale experimental transplants of genetically modified pig organs—two hearts and two kidneys—and none lived longer than two months.

“If you saw her on the street, you would have no idea that she is the only person in the world walking around with a functioning pig organ inside her,” Dr. Robert Montgomery of NYU Langone Health, who led Looney’s transplant.

Montgomery described Looney’s kidney function as “absolutely normal.” Doctors hope she can leave New York – where she is temporarily living for follow-up visits – to her home in Gadsden, Alabama, in about another month.

“We are very optimistic that this will continue to work, and over a longer period of time,” he said.

Scientists are genetically modifying pigs to make their organs more human-like to address the severe shortage of transplantable human organs. More than 100,000 people are on the U.S. transplant list, most needing a kidney, and thousands are dying in anticipation.

Pig organ transplants have historically been “compassionate use” cases, experiments that the Food and Drug Administration only allows under special circumstances for people who have no other options.

And the few hospitals that are trying them are sharing information about what worked and what didn’t, in preparation for the world’s first official trials of xenotransplantation, expected to begin sometime this year. United Therapeutics, which supplied Looney’s kidney, recently asked the Food and Drug Administration for permission to begin a study.

How Looney fares is “a very valuable experience,” Dr. Tatsuo Kawai of Massachusetts General Hospital, who led the world’s first porcine kidney transplant last year and is working with another pig developer, eGenesis.

Looney is much healthier than the previous patients, Kawai noted, so her progress will be helpful in the next trials. “We have to learn from each other,” he said.

Looney donated a kidney to her mother in 1999. Later pregnancy complications led to high blood pressure, which damaged her remaining kidney, which eventually failed, an extremely rare occurrence in living donors. She spent eight years on dialysis before doctors concluded she would probably never get a donated organ – she had developed extremely high levels of antibodies that were unusually primed to attack another human kidney.

So Looney, 53, set out to find the pig experiment. No one knew how it would work in someone “highly sensitized” with these overactive antibodies.

Montgomery’s team was released just 11 days after surgery on Nov. 25 and has been closely tracking her recovery through blood tests and other measurements. About three weeks after the transplant, they noticed subtle signs of incipient rejection – signs they had learned to look for thanks to an experiment in 2023 in which a pig kidney functioned for 61 days in a deceased man whose body was donated for research.

Montgomery said they successfully treated Looney and there have been no signs of decline since then – and a few weeks ago she met the family behind this cadaver research.

“It feels really good to know that the decision I made at NYU to send my brother was the right decision and it helps people,” said Mary Miller-Duffy of Newburgh, New York.

Looney, in turn, tries to help others by acting as what Montgomery describes as an ambassador for people who have reached out to her on social media, sharing their distress about the long wait for transplants and concerns about pig kidneys.

One of them, she said, was being considered for a xenotransplant at another hospital but was frightened and wondering whether to proceed.

“I didn’t want to convince him whether he should do it or not,” Looney said. Instead, she asked him if he was religious and told him to pray, “to give up believing what your heart tells you.”

“I love talking to people, I love helping people,” she added. “I want to be an educational contribution, so to speak, for scientists to help others.”

There’s no telling how long Looney’s new kidney will function, but if it fails, she could end up on dialysis again.

“The truth is we don’t really know what the next hurdles are because this is the first time we’ve come this far,” Montgomery said. “We need to continue to keep a close eye on them.”

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Science and Educational Media Group of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.