A 53 year old American woman is in recovery and feeling well over two months after receiving a gene-edited pig kidney. Towana Looney is the third kidney recipient of this sort of genetically-edited animal transplant, and is now the longest living person to have undergone the procedure.
Transplantation using organs from non-human species is known as xenotransplantation. Last year Richard Slayman, a 62 year old man with kidney failure, had a successful transplant of a genetically edited pig kidney, but sadly died just seven weeks after surgery. In April 2024 another kidney patient, Lisa Pisano, also received a combined heart pump implementation and pig kidney transplant, but died in July 2024.
Doctors were optimistic as Ms Looney was in better health before surgery than previous patients. She donated a kidney to her mother in 1999, but then developed kidney failure several years later due to complications during a pregnancy. It is very rare for living kidney donors to develop kidney failure.

Ms Looney, who lives in Alabama, began dialysis treatment in December 2016 and joined the US transplant waiting list shortly after. Finding a suitable match proved extremely difficult, however; unusually high levels of harmful antibodies in her blood meant she was at a high risk of her body rejecting a transplant.
She volunteered for the highly experimental surgery after hearing about research into xenotransplantation and underwent surgery on 25 November 2024 at NYU Langone Health, a medical centre in New York.
After 11 days of observation after surgery, Ms Looney was discharged from hospital. She is currently staying in New York and visiting hospital every day, but doctors hope she will be able to return home in about a month. Ms Looney called the transplant a “blessing”.

I feel like I’ve been given another chance at life. I cannot wait to be able to travel again and spend more quality time with my family and grandchildren.Towana Looney, the third kidney recipient of this sort of genetically-edited animal transplant
The procedure was led by surgeon Dr Robert Montgomery. He called Ms Looney “a beacon of hope to those struggling with kidney failure”.
Around 70,000 people in the UK are currently being treated for kidney failure.
Xenotransplantation represents an exciting area of medicine, but research is still very limited. Even if transplants like Ms Looney’s prove successful in the long-term, it could be many years before genetically-edited animal transplantation is more widely available.
Fiona Loud of Kidney Care UK co-chairs the stakeholder group of the Organ Utilisation Group (OUG), sponsored by the Department of Health and Social Care, which aims improve organ donation in the UK. The OUG has recommended a national oversight system for emerging therapies like xenotransplantation, with particular focus on ethics and safety.
Right now there are over 6,250 people in the UK waiting for a kidney transplant and receiving a kidney transplant from a living or deceased donor remains the best hope for improving their quality of life.
These transplants were performed on a compassionate basis and the FDA (the US Food and Drug Administration body) has now granted permission for further transplants as part of a trial which will add to the learning over the next few years.
All photos by Joe Carrotta for NYU Langone Health.