An Alabama woman passed a major milestone Saturday to become the longest-living recipient of a pig organ transplant – healthy and full of energy with her new kidney for 61 days and counting.

“I’m superwoman,” Towana Looney told The Associated Press, laughing about outpacing family members on long walks around New York City as she continues her recovery. “It’s a new take on life.”

Looney’s vibrant recovery is a morale boost in the quest to make animal-to-human transplants a reality. Looney the fifth American given a gene-edited pig organ.

“If you saw her on the street, you would have no idea that she’s the only person in the world walking around with a pig organ inside them that’s functioning,” said Dr. Robert Montgomery of NYU Langone Health, who led Looney’s transplant.

Montgomery called Looney’s kidney function “absolutely normal.” Doctors hope she can leave New York – where she’s temporarily living for post-transplant checkups – for her Gadsden, Alabama, home in about another month.

“We’re quite optimistic that this is going to continue to work and work well for, you know, a significant period of time,” he said.

Why scientists are using pig organs for transplants

Scientists are genetically altering pigs so their organs are more humanlike to address a severe shortage of transplantable human organs. More than 100,000 people are on the U.S. transplant list, most who need a kidney, and thousands die waiting.

Pig organ transplants so far have been “compassionate use” cases, experiments the Food and Drug Administration allows only in special circumstances for people out of other options.

And the handful of hospitals trying them are sharing information of what worked and what didn’t, in preparation for the world’s first formal studies of xenotransplantation, expected to begin sometime this year. United Therapeutics, which supplied Looney’s kidney, recently asked the Food and Drug Administration for permission to begin a trial.

How Looney fares is a “very precious experience,” said Dr. Tatsuo Kawai of Massachusetts General Hospital, who led the world’s first pig kidney transplant last year and works with another pig developer, eGenesis.

Looney was far healthier than the prior patients, Kawai noted, so her progress will help inform the next attempts.

“We have to learn from each other,” he said.

Towana Looney’s transplant story

Looney donated a kidney to her mother in 1999. Later pregnancy complications caused high blood pressure that damaged her remaining kidney, which eventually failed, something incredibly rare among living donors. She spent eight years on dialysis before doctors concluded she’d likely never get a donated organ – she’d developed super-high levels of antibodies abnormally primed to attack another human kidney.

So Looney, 53, sought out the pig experiment. No one knew how it would work in someone “highly sensitized” with those overactive antibodies.

Discharged just 11 days after the Nov. 25 surgery, Montgomery’s team has closely tracked her recovery through blood tests and other measurements. About three weeks after the transplant, they caught subtle signs that rejection was beginning – signs they’d learned to look for thanks to a 2023 experiment when a pig kidney worked for 61 days inside a deceased man whose body was donated for research.

Montgomery said they successfully treated Looney and there’s been no sign of rejection since – and a few weeks ago she met the family behind that deceased-body research.

“It feels really good to know that the decision I made for NYU to use my brother was the right decision and it’s helping people,” said Mary Miller-Duffy, of Newburgh, New York.

Looney in turn is trying to help others, serving as what Montgomery calls an ambassador for people who’ve been reaching out to her through social media, sharing their distress at the long wait for transplants and wondering about pig kidneys.

One, she said, was being considered for a xenotransplant at another hospital but was scared, wondering whether to proceed.

“I didn’t want to persuade him whether to do or not to do it,” Looney said.

Instead, she asked if he was religious and urged him to pray, to “go off your faith, what your heart tells you.”

“I love talking to people, I love helping people,” she added. “I want to be, like, some educational piece” for scientists to help others.

There’s no way to predict how long Looney’s new kidney will work but if it were to fail she could receive dialysis again.

“The truth is we don’t really know what the next hurdles are because this is the first time we’ve gotten this far,” Montgomery said. “We’ll have to continue to really keep a close eye on her.”

Washington — Two Senate Republicans on Monday introduced legislation to protect access to in vitro fertilization, known as IVF, after a Democratic-led effort to do so failed earlier this year in the upper chamber.

The bill, titled the IVF Protection Act, was introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama. 

It seeks to safeguard IVF nationwide by banning states from receiving Medicaid funding if they enact an outright ban on the fertility procedure. The bill defines IVF as “eggs are collected from ovaries and manually fertilized by sperm, for later placement inside of a uterus.” 

It would not force any individual or organization to provide IVF services, nor would it prevent states from implementing health and safety measures within clinics that provide such services. 

“IVF has given miraculous hope to millions of Americans, and it has given families across the country the gift of children,” Cruz said in a statement Monday. 

Britt said in a statement that the procedure is “pro-family” and that legislation “affirms both life and liberty.” 

Lawmakers have sought to protect the fertility treatment after an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos are considered children under the law. The Alabama ruling could have major implications on the procedure, and raises questions about whether frozen embryos that are not transferred into a woman’s uterus will have to be stored indefinitely or whether charges could be brought for wrongful death if an embryo does not survive the process. 

Several clinics in Alabama paused IVF treatments after the ruling over fears of legal repercussions if the treatment failed. Alabama has since enacted a law shielding in vitro fertilization providers from potential legal liability. 

The ruling also threatened to become a liability for Republicans as polls showed that most voters think IVF should be legal. 

Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois sought to have her bill, the Access to Family Building Act, passed by unanimous consent in February, but it was blocked by Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, who said it was a “vast overreach.” 

Duckworth’s bill would have granted individuals the right to IVF and other fertility treatments and given health care providers the right to provide such care without fear of being prosecuted. The measure also would have allowed insurance providers to cover the costly treatments. 

Cruz claimed in an interview with Bloomberg on Monday that Duckworth’s measure sought to “backdoor in broader abortion legislation” in explaining why it did not have Republican support. 

Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois on Thursday told CBS News that the new law passed by the Alabama legislature designed to protect fertility clinics that provide in vitro fertilization services from liability “does not go far enough.” In 2022, Duckworth introduced legislation that would create federal protections for IVF access nationwide. Janet Shamlian has more.

IVF clinics that shut down over a controversial court ruling are getting ready to reopen after Republican lawmakers pushed through a bill to protect those facilities from criminal liability. The state had seen weeks of protests after the Alabama Supreme Court declared human embryos have the same legal rights as children.

The University of Alabama’s hospital has paused in vitro fertilization treatment after the state’s Supreme Court ruled frozen embryos are considered people. Meg Oliver takes a look at what the ruling means in Alabama and nationwide.