Pig kidney removed from US transplant patient, but she set record

WASHINGTON: Doctors have had to remove the pig kidney implanted in an American woman after her body rejected it, but her four months living with the animal´s organ set a record, the hospital that performed the operation said on Friday.

Towana Looney, a woman in her fifties from the southern state of Alabama, had received the genetically modified pig kidney on November 25 in New York. The highly experimental procedure had fueled optimism that animal kidneys might prove a usable source amid a chronic shortage of available human kidneys.

Her body´s eventual rejection of the transplant showed that the reliable use of animal organs remains a distant goal, but doctors took some hope since the pig kidney did its blood-filtering work for 130 days before the body began rejecting it.