Doctors in the United States successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a patient. The medical team announced on Tuesday that 53-year-old Towana Looney underwent the operation in November. She is only the third person ever to receive a modified pig kidney.

Woman was operated on 25 November at the „NYU Langone“ clinic in New York. The hospital specialises in such operations, but the current technique is still in its early experimental phase. Before transplantation, the organ is stripped of the pig's genes that are harmful to humans and a number of human genes are inserted into the organ.

„I feel like I have been given a second chance to live“, – the patient is quoted in the medical team's report. She donated one kidney to her mother in 1999. The remaining kidney stopped functioning during a pregnancy complication. Since 2016, Ms Looney, who lives in Alabama, has been on dialysis while she waited unsuccessfully for a donor kidney.

When her health deteriorated, she opted for surgery at a special clinic in New York. With a shortage of donor organs, medical science is increasingly turning to animal organs. This area of research is called xenotransplantation.

T. Looney is currently the only person in the world with an animal organ. In March, he underwent the first such surgery on the planet in the USA. Richard Slayman, 62, survived the operation well but died two months later. Lisa Pasano underwent a second such operation – she needed dialysis again after 47 days and died in July.