An Alabama woman passed a major milestone Saturday by becoming the longest-serving pig organ transplant recipient — healthy and full of energy with her new kidney at 61 days and counting.
“I'm superhuman,” Tofanna Looney told The Associated Press, laughing at outmatching family members on long walks around New York City as she continues her recovery. “It's a new experience of life.”
The vibrant recovery is a morale booster in the quest to make animal-to-human transplants a reality.
Only four other Americans received highly experimental transplants of gene-edited pig organs—two hearts and two kidneys—and none lived more than two months.
“If you saw them on the street, you would have no idea they were the only person in the world walking around with a working pig organ inside them,” said Dr. Robert Montgomery of UNL Health, who led Lozens for Loni's ministry.
Montgomery called Looney's kidney function “completely normal.”
Doctors hope she will be able to leave New York—where she lives temporarily for post-transplant checkups—for Gadsden, Alabama, in about another month.
“We're quite optimistic that this will continue to work and do well for, you know, a significant period of time,” he said.
Scientists are genetically altering pigs so their organs are more humane to address a severe shortage of transplantable human organs.
More than 100,000 people are on America's transplant list, most of them needing a kidney, and thousands are dying waiting.
Pig organ transplants have so far been a “sympathy” in emotional use cases, with the FDA only allowing them in special circumstances for people of other options.
And a handful of hospitals are trying to share information about what worked and what didn't, in preparation for the world's first formal studies of a Xenotranslation transplant, expected to begin sometime this year.
United Therapeutics, which supplied Looney's kidneys, recently asked the Food and Drug Administration for permission to start a trial.
said Dr. Tatsuo Kawai of Massachusetts General Hospital, who led the world's first kidney transplant last year and is working with another developer, Egenesis.
Kawai noted that Loni was much healthier than previous patients, so her progress will help inform next attempts. “We have to learn from each other,” he said.
Lonnie donated a kidney to her mother in 1999.
Pregnancy complications later caused high blood pressure that damaged her remaining organ, which eventually failed, which is extremely rare among living donors.
She spent eight years on dialysis before doctors concluded she likely wouldn't get a donor organ—she had developed high levels of antibodies that were abnormally poised to attack another human kidney.
So Lonnie, 53, sought out the pig.
No one knows how it would work in a “hypersensitive” person with those hyperactive antibodies.
She was discharged just 11 days after surgery on Nov. 25, and Montgomery's team has been closely tracking her recovery through blood tests and other measurements.
About three weeks after the transplant, they discovered subtle signs that rejection had begun — signs they had learned to look for thanks to a 2023 experiment when a pig kidney worked for 61 days inside a deceased man whose body had been donated for research.
Montgomery said they successfully dealt with Looney and there's been no sign of rejection since — and a few weeks ago she met the family behind the deceased body research.
“It's really nice to know that the decision I made for NYU to use my brother was the right one and he's helping people,” said Mary Miller Duffy, of Newburgh, New York.
Lonnie, in turn, is trying to help others, acting as what Montgomery calls an ambassador for people who have been reaching out to her via social media, sharing their distress in the long wait for transplants and wondering about pig kidneys.
One was being considered for a xenotransplant at another hospital but was afraid, wondering whether to go ahead, she said.
“I didn't want to convince him whether to do it or not to do it,” Looney said. Instead, she asked if he was religious and urged him to pray, “turn away from your faith, what your heart tells you.”
“I like talking to people, I like helping people,” she added. “I want to be, like, some educational article” for scientists to help others.
There is no way to predict how long your new kidney will work, but if it fails, you may receive 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 will have to continue to monitor it closely.”
