NEW YORK ‒ If records are meant to be broken, Towana Looney is grateful to be a record-breaker.
Looney has been living for 10 weeks with a kidney from a pig instead of her own. The longest anyone has survived with an organ from another species had been 60 days.
The woman from Gadsen, Alabama, has been staying in a rented Manhattan apartment a few miles from NYU Langone Hospital, where she received the pig kidney on Nov. 25. It’s her first time in New York City, but she hasn’t done much beyond her nearly daily hourslong visits to the hospital for blood work and other checkups.
Still, besides the cold weather and the high prices, Looney, on leave from her job at a Dollar General store in Gadsden, doesn’t have many complaints.
She has been happy with her medical care, especially her two favorite nurses, Taylor and Jackie. The cost of the experimental treatment, the apartment and her living expenses have been covered by the hospital ‒ one of a small number across the country that has been working to solve the human organ shortage by using pigs.
As far as Looney is concerned, her pig kidney is working perfectly.
“Still going strong and feeling great,” she said by text Monday. “I can’t wait to get back to Alabama.”
She has an appetite again and on one warm day walked 10 New York City blocks, a distance that would have been unimaginable during the seven years she was on dialysis.
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 other patients who have received pig kidneys ‒ one at NYU Langone and one at 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.
On Monday, the FDA approved the first clinical trial for so-called xenotransplantation by a company that raised most of the pigs for the earlier transplants, United Therapeutics.
United Therapeutics, a public company based in Silver Spring, Maryland, plans to test its pig kidneys first in six patients with end-stage kidney disease and then in as many as 50.
Patients will be considered for the trial, which will start this year, if they are ineligible for a human transplant for medical reasons or are on the wait list but are more likely to die than receive a human transplant within five years.
No longer waiting to die
Because Looney had donated a kidney to her mother in 1999, she was at the top of the transplant list when she needed one herself about eight years ago.
She waited and hoped for a human donor kidney that would be a good match. Because of past blood transfusions and natural antibodies, Looney’s immune system would have rejected most human donors.
Despite being checked against thousands of potential matches, the right one never came.
She could have kept waiting, but her doctors said there was essentially no hope that a human match would be found.
Looney didn’t want to simply wait to die, so she volunteered to be part of the transplant trials ‒ even knowing the previous four patients had died.
She’s now living her best life, her daughter Tytiana Looney likes to say.
In addition to her near-daily hospital visits, she passes the time with Tytiana, a lab technician, who has been with her since Christmas, and by Facetiming her other daughter and two “grandbabies,” a 10-year-old and a 3-month old. The 10-year-old visited over the holidays and “didn’t want to leave.”
Over Sunday brunch in Manhattan recently, Looney said she also understands why the two kidney patients and especially the two heart transplant patients who went before her did not survive.
The pig organ is so healthy, she said, that if she had waited to be sicker than she was ‒ if she had been as sick as they were ‒ she believes she could not have made it either.
Getting such a healthy organ, she said, is “like putting high-octane gas in a ’67 Chevy.”
Not taking chances
Doctors are confident Looney is doing well, but they aren’t taking any chances.
If Looney is going to have a problem, they want to know the instant something starts to go wrong, so they can address a small problem before it becomes a major one.
So she has been going into NYU Langone Hospital nearly every day since her surgery. She wears a ring and a watch monitoring her heart rate, blood pressure and other metrics.
She was wearing a monitoring necklace, too, but recently gave that back. It was so sensitive that she once bumped it and “they went hysterical,” Looney said, and called her immediately to ask what was wrong.
About three weeks after the transplant, it looked as if Looney’s body was starting to reject the new organ. But because doctors caught the problem quickly, they were able to treat her the way they’d treat any patient rejecting a human organ ‒ and she has since stabilized, said Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, who has led her care.
Montgomery said he will get another biopsy of Looney’s kidney near the end of the month to be sure it’s healthy, then send her home to Alabama. She’ll check in with doctors there once a week and come back to New York about once a month, he said.
The patients in the United Therapeutics trial also will be followed for life.
Ethics of animal-to-human transplants
Some people have ethical concerns with sacrificing pigs for people.
“The kidney she received came at the cost of another’s life,” said Alka Chandna, vice president of laboratory investigations cases at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an advocacy group.
“Treating animals as spare parts is both unethical and dangerous,” she said in an emailed statement to USA TODAY.
One of the Maryland transplant patients showed evidence of a pig virus in the transplanted heart, highlighting concerns that so-called zoonotic viruses could transfer along with the transplant.
“Instead of killing animals and playing Russian Roulette with zoonotic pathogens, efforts should focus on modernizing the human organ procurement system, which wastes thousands of viable organs each year, and preventive healthcare that can reduce the need for transplants in the first place,” Chandna said.
The pig used in Looney was bred to be free of known viruses and was carefully checked before the transplant to ensure it did not have the virus, NYU officials said.
Ethicists have said transplanting organs from animals to humans is no more morally concerning than killing them for food.
Looney feels the same way.
“You eat bacon,” she said.
