The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant

第一个接受新型肾移植的女性

Short Wave

2024-12-20

14 分钟
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Towana Looney became the first living person in the world to get a kidney from a new kind of genetically modified pig last month. Health correspondent Rob Stein got exclusive access to be in the operating room. Towana is a 53-year-old grandmother from Gadsden, Ala. She's been on dialysis for four hours a day, three days a week since 2016. Her immune system would reject a human kidney. So the Food and Drug Administration made an exception to its usual clinical study requirements to allow Looney this new kind of pig kidney. But the procedure is controversial. Interested in more environmental stories? Email us at shortwave@npr.org. We'd love to hear from you! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
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  • You're listening to Short Wave from npr.

  • Hey, shortwavers.

  • Regina Barber here, and I'm here with my colleague, NPR health correspondent and awesome guy Rob Stein.

  • Hey, Rob.

  • Hey, Gina.

  • I hear that you've been working on this really interesting story for the past year.

  • Yeah, yeah.

  • I've been following the developments of a biotech company called Revivicore that's been moving towards a very ambitious goal, and that is to use cloned, genetically modified farm animals to provide organs for transplants for humans.

  • Okay, so you're saying farm animals.

  • So there's like a farm just full of cloned animals?

  • Yeah, yeah.

  • In fact, I went to visit this farm.

  • I drove down a road through the Blue Ridge Mountains in southwest Virginia to visit the Rivercore Farm back in February.

  • This farm, it has like 22 buildings and around 300 pigs.

  • We had to change into hospital scrubs before going inside to protect the pigs.