Alabama woman doing well after experimental pig kidney transplant
NEW YORK, Dec 17: An Alabama woman is recovering well after a pig kidney transplant last month that freed her from eight years of dialysis, the latest effort to save human lives with animal organs. Towana Looney is the fifth American given a gene-edited pig organ – and notably, she isn’t as sick as prior recipients who died within two months of receiving a pig kidney or heart.
“It’s like a new beginning,” Looney, 53, told The Associated Press. Right away, “the energy I had was amazing. To have a working kidney – and to feel it – is unbelievable.” Looney’s surgery marks an important step as scientists get ready for formal studies of xenotransplantation expected to begin next year, said Dr. Robert Montgomery of NYU Langone Health, who led the highly experimental procedure.
Looney is recuperating well after her transplant, which was announced Tuesday. She was discharged from the hospital just 11 days after surgery to continue recovery in a nearby apartment although temporarily readmitted this week while her medications are adjusted. Doctors expect her to return home to Alabama in three months. If the pig kidney were to fail, she could begin dialysis again.
“To see hope restored to her and her family is extraordinary,” said Dr. Jayme Locke, Looney’s original surgeon who secured Food and Drug Administration (FDA) permission for the November 25 transplant.
Looney donated a kidney to her mother in 1999. Later a complication during pregnancy caused high blood pressure that damaged her remaining kidney, which eventually failed. It’s incredibly rare for living donors to develop kidney failure although those who do are given extra priority on the transplant list.
But Looney couldn’t get a match – she had developed antibodies abnormally primed to attack another human kidney. Tests showed she’d reject every kidney donors have offered.
Then Looney heard about pig kidney research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and told Locke, at the time a UAB transplant surgeon, she’d like to try one. In April 2023, Locke filed an FDA application seeking an emergency experiment, under rules for people like Looney who are out of options.
The FDA didn’t agree right away. Instead, the world’s first gene-edited pig kidney transplants went to two sicker patients last spring, at Massachusetts General Hospital and NYU.
Both also had serious heart disease. The Boston patient recovered enough to spend about a month at home before dying of sudden cardiac arrest deemed unrelated to the pig kidney. NYU’s patient had heart complications that damaged her pig kidney, forcing its removal, and she later died.
Those disappointing outcomes didn’t dissuade Looney, who was starting to feel worse on dialysis but, Locke said, hadn’t developed heart disease or other complications. (AP)
Pope reveals apparent bombing plot during his 2021 visit to Iraq
Rome, Dec 17: Pope Francis turned 88 on Tuesday and marked the occasion with revelations that he almost didn’t make it. According to excerpts of his upcoming autobiography, suicide bombers had planned to attack him during his 2021 visit to Iraq, but were killed before striking.
Italian daily Corriere della Sera on Tuesday ran excerpts of Hope: The Autobiography, written with Italian author Carlo Musso, which is being released in more than 80 countries next month.
In the Italian excerpts, Francis recalled his historic March 2021 trip to Iraq, the first ever by a pope. COVID-19 was still raging and security concerns were high, especially in Mosul. The city had been the headquarters of Islamic State militants, whose horrific reign had largely emptied the region of its Christian communities.
According to the book, British intelligence informed Iraqi police as soon as Francis arrived in Baghdad that a woman wearing explosives was heading toward Mosul and was planning to blow herself up during the papal visit. “And that a truck was heading there fast with the same intention,” Francis says in the book. The visit went ahead as planned, albeit under tight security, and became one of the most poignant of all of Francis’ foreign trips: Standing in the wreckage of a Mosul church, Francis urged Iraq’s Christians to forgive the injustices against them by Muslim extremists and to rebuild. (AP)