MACKINAC ISLAND, Mich. (AP) — Democrat

“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 permission for the transplant.More than 100,000 people are on the U.S. transplant list, most who need a kidney. Thousands die waiting and many more who need a transplant never qualify. Now, searching for an alternate supply, scientists are genetically altering pigs so their organs are more humanlike.

Looney donated a kidney to her mother in 1999. Later pregnancy complications 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 t

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. The FDA eventually allowed her transplant at NYU, where Locke collaborated with Montgomery.

Moments after Montgomery sewed the pig kidney into place, it turned a healthy pink and began producing urine.The findings were released Thursday by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and will be discussed at its annual meeting in Chicago. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, was led by Lucas Mavromatis, a medical student at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.

“Chronic disease and chronic disease prevention are some of my passions,” said Mavromatis, a former research fellow with an NIH training program.GLP-1 receptor agonists are injections used to treat diabetes, and some are also approved to treat obesity. They work by mimicking hormones in the gut and the brain to regulate appetite and feelings of fullness. They

and can produce side effects that include nausea and stomach pain.In the study, researchers analyzed data from 43 U.S. health systems to compare two groups: people with