[Image of doctor and kidneys. Photo credit: Pixabay]

The third successful kidney transplant in the United States using a kidney taken from a genetically modified pig was performed on a 53-year-old lady from Alabama who suffered from  renal failure.

Eleven days following the successful surgery, Towana Looney, the patient, was discharged from the hospital in better condition than any prior  recipients of pig organs to date.

The transplant community will be closely monitoring the case,  as a successful outcome could accelerate clinical studies and bring pig transplants closer to becoming a viable solution  as a possible solution of the organ-supply crisis.

According to physicians, Ms. Looney no longer requires dialysis since the transplant, and her blood pressure, which had remained uncontrollably high for decades despite a variety of drugs, is now under control.

Even prior to her waking up from the surgery, the kidney she got began to produce urine, and blood tests reveal it is effectively removing the waste substance creatinine from her body.

Dr. Jayme Locke, a transplant surgeon who sought to the Food and Drug Administration approval two years ago to operate on Ms. Looney, co-led the procedure with Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute.

Due to her high blood antibody levels from frequent contact to foreign tissue during blood transfusions and pregnancy, finding a suitable human kidney for Ms. Looney was particularly difficult.

In the U.S, over 100,000 Americans who suffer from severe organ illness or organ failure are on waiting lists for a donor organ and over 90,000 of those  are waiting for a kidney.

However, fewer than 30,000 kidneys are transplanted annually, sourced either from deceased donors or occasionally from living donors.

Only a fraction of the more than 550,000 dialysis patients are on waiting lists. 

Due to the scarcity of organs, many patients are not eligible for waiting lists, which thoroughly evaluate applicants.

Even for eligible individuals, prolonged dialysis often leads to a decline in their health, with only roughly half of them surviving for more than five years.

Despite making up only 13.5% of the population, Black patients, like Ms. Looney, account for 35% of dialysis patients. 

This is partially due to higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension.

Genetically modifying animals could be a major source of essential organs for transplant recipients if they could be effectively genetically altered to make their organs less likely to trigger a strong immunological reaction in humans.

Ms. Looney is just the third patient in the US to get a kidney from a genetically engineered pig, and the fifth overall since 2022. 

Pig hearts have also been transplanted into two men, both of whom passed away shortly after.

As the case of organ transplants vary heavily from one individual to another, scientists have gained critical insights with each treatment.

The first human-to-human heart transplant only lasted two weeks, and modern medical procedures and the appearance of heart transplants differ greatly from those early attempts.

Under the Food and Drug Administration's extended access or compassionate use program, which permits the use of unapproved medications in patients with life-threatening diseases, the experimental treatment was allowed.

The kidney was sourced from a pig that had undergone ten genetic modifications. 

Revivicor, a division of United Therapeutics Corporation, one of at least two businesses now creating genetically altered pigs for organ transplantation, supplied it.