A woman lived with a pig kidney for a record number of days.

Researchers see significant potential in the transplantation of pig organs for modern medicine. To address the shortage of donor material, specialists have learned to "turn off" the genes in pigs that are rejected by the human body, and they are conducting experiments transplanting pig kidneys or hearts into humans. So far, it has not been possible to achieve complete recovery for patients after the operation: the organs would "take" and start functioning, but death occurred at most after 61 days. The "persistence" with which the human body rejects foreign bodies has even been utilized in the fight against cancer.

Experts from the NYU Langone Medical Center in New York have successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a patient, allowing the woman to live for more than two months and even feel well after that "milestone." The condition of the operated 53-year-old American, Towana Looney, was reported by The Associated Press.

Dr. Robert Montgomery, who led the transplant, stated that Looney's transplanted kidney is functioning "absolutely normally." Doctors hope that in a month, the woman can be discharged from New York to her home in Alabama. While it is impossible to predict how long the transplanted organ will last, there is a possibility that it will function "for a significant period of time."

Dr. Tatsuo Kawai from Massachusetts General Hospital, who was the first in the world to transplant a pig kidney into a human, noted that Looney was much healthier than previous patients who underwent such an operation. This means that her progress will help medical professionals advance further in the study of xenotransplantation, which involves transplanting organs from other biological species into humans.

Towana Looney donated one of her kidneys to her mother in 1999, while the other was damaged due to high blood pressure—a complication from her pregnancy. As a result, Looney's remaining kidney ceased to function, which is extremely rare among living donors. The woman spent eight years on dialysis, and doctors realized that she could not receive a human organ transplant due to the development of an extremely high level of antibodies abnormally set to attack another human kidney.

Looney received the pig organ on November 25, and was discharged 11 days later. Approximately three weeks after the operation, doctors noted barely noticeable signs of rejection, which they learned to detect thanks to an experiment in 2023 (when a pig kidney lasted 61 days in the body of a deceased man). The woman was successfully treated, and no further rejection signals were observed.

It is impossible to predict how much longer Looney will be able to live with her new kidney. However, if the organ fails, the patient can once again resort to dialysis.

"The truth is, we really don’t know what the next obstacles will be, because we haven't gone this far before," said Dr. Montgomery. "We will have to continue to closely monitor Towana."