Chicago – February 04, 2025
If records are meant to be broken, Towana Looney is very grateful to be a record-breaker.
Looney has now been living for 10 weeks with a kidney from a pig instead of her own, beating the previous record of 60 days that anyone has survived with an organ from another species.
The Gadsen, Alabama, woman has been staying in a rented Manhattan apartment a few miles from NYU Langone Hospital where she received the pig kidney on Nov. 25.
Animal organs have been under development as a possible substitute for human ones for decades. Looney is the fifth person to receive one under what the Food and Drug Adminstration calls “compassionate use,” for people without other options.
The two previous patients who received pig kidneys ‒ one at NYU Langone and one Massachusetts General Hospital ‒ died or had their transplant removed within eight weeks, as did two men who received pig hearts at the University of Maryland.
