Last month, a woman became the third living person to receive a pig kidney. Now, her kidney function is completely normal, and she's off dialysis.
The transplant recipient — Towana Looney, 53, of Alabama — had donated a kidney to her mother back in 1999. A few years later, though, she developed high blood pressure associated with preeclampsia during pregnancy. The condition led her to develop chronic kidney disease, and she needed to start dialysis in 2016. Dialysis does the work of the kidneys by removing waste and extra fluid from the blood.
