VIDEO — ‘It’s a Blessing’: Alabama Grandmother Freed from Dialysis After Groundbreaking Pig Kidney Transplant

A grandmother from Alabama is doing well after receiving a gene-edited pig organ during a transplant surgery in November.

Fifty-three-year-old Towana Looney is the fifth American to be given such an organ, the Associated Press (AP) reported on Tuesday.

Looney, whose eight years of dialysis is now over, is doing better than other recipients who died two months after receiving a pig kidney or heart:

“It’s a blessing. I feel like I’ve been given another chance at life. I cannot wait to be able to travel again and spend more quality time with my family and grandchildren,” Looney said, according to a press release from NYU Langone Health.

The lead physician on the team for Looney’s case was Dr. Robert Montgomery of NYU Langone Health.

The surgery is a “promising breakthrough” in the face of an organ supply crisis, the news release continued:

Towana Looney, 53, donated a kidney to her mother in 1999 but developed kidney failure several years later after a complication during pregnancy caused damaging high blood pressure. Less than 1 percent of living donors develop kidney failure, but those who do need a transplant are given higher priority on the waiting list. By December 2016, she needed to start dialysis treatment to remove excess fluid and waste from her blood stream. She was listed for kidney transplantation in early 2017, but it proved nearly impossible to find a suitable match: the unusually high levels of harmful antibodies in her blood made a devastating form of transplant rejection likely. She remained on the transplant waiting list for nearly eight years while slowly losing accessible blood vessels to support dialysis.

Eventually, “Looney was authorized to receive a pig kidney with 10 gene edits under the Food and Drug Administration’s expanded access program, otherwise known as compassionate use,” the press release said, adding the procedure is known as Xenotransplantation.

Video footage shows the surgery:

“Looney’s procedure marks the third time that a kidney from a gene-edited pig has been transplanted into a living human. She is the first to receive a kidney from a pig with 10 gene edits and is currently the only person in the world living with a pig organ,” the news release stated.

It is important to note that researchers on a Virginia farm who breed genetically modified pigs to transplant their organs to people bred the pig whose kidney Looney received, AFP reported on Tuesday.

Approximately 90,413 patients are currently on the kidney transplant waiting list, per CBS Mornings.