We shared her story when Towana Looney broke the 60-day record with a xeno-organ. A month has passed since then; check out what she says in this inspiring video from NYU Langone Health.
Towana celebrates 3 months with a pig kidney!
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Tag Archives: xenotransplantation
Record living with a pig kidney: 60 days and counting
Credit: Mateo Salcedo/NYU Langone Health
The other xenograft patients arrived at the operating theatre in critical condition, which likely contributed to why none of them survived beyond two months. Towana Looney, however, was in better health when she received the pig kidney edited to reduce the risk of rejection. She benefited from the insights gained from earlier attempts and, on January 25, celebrated a record sixty days with an animal organ. She is the first patient to receive a kidney from a pig with 10 genetic modifications and is currently the only person in the world living with a pig organ.
CRISPR news of the week
Don’t miss the lipid nanoparticles delivering CRISPR to the lungs (in Nature), the ever-growing CRISPR toolbox (in the CRISPR Journal), and the pig-monkey xenograft that brings experimentation on human patients closer (also in Nature).
Xenografts – here’s where we stand
David Bennett, the first patient transplanted with a genetically edited pig heart, died on March 8 last year, two months after the surgery, presumably from a latent pig virus (a problem that does not seem hard to solve with more stringent protocols and screening, as Linda Scobie explained to me a few months ago). Since then, experimental transplants have continued in brain-dead patients who had donated their bodies to research. After xenokidneys with a single genetic modification transplanted in late 2021, in the summer of 2022 it was the turn of ten edits xenohearts. The state of the art now is that the potential of the approach still appears high, as does the morale of specialists.
Continue readingCover of the week
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CRISPeR FRENZY 