After several rounds of genetic engineering scientists humanized pigs to such a degree that the human immune system doesn't protest much.
Image by Mabel Amber, still incognito... from Pixabay
@kralizec and subscribe to my Youtube channel at Kralizec Gaming Youtube ChannelA huge limiting factor for using transplants to save lives is the number of organs available. Thus, only those whore are very seriously ill are written on to the list of those awaiting an organ. And sadly, many do not live to see the day of their transplant. Yet, transplants could improve the quality of life for many more patients not only those would die without one.
Finding a replacement for organs coming from human donors is something that is being done by many different teams in several different scientific fields. In some cases, technology can fill in the blanks – this is, for example, the case of the kidney as dialysis is sometimes called an artificial kidney. Or in the case of “broken heart”, a pump can replace it.
But other organs do not have their technological equivalent. That is why some scientists are trying to grow replacement organs in their laboratories. But, so far we have successfully only grown a few types of tissue like skin or blood vessel tissue.
On the other way, that was especially hopeful back in the nineties were xenotransplants. Even large pharmaceutical companies were ready to invest large sums of money in this field. For example, the company Novartis wanted to spend two billion dollars on genetically modifying pigs to be useful as at least short-term organ donors. Sadly, the plans were just too ambitious.
But, it seems better times are here. CRISPR is again opening the doors for xenotransplants. What was just twenty years ago too big of a bit even for giant corporations is now a research option over for relatively small teams with relatively small budgets. One of them is a Chinese company Qihan Bio and its American partner eGeneisis. These companies have now made a massive advancement in making genetically engineered pigs for donating organs. On their own pigs' organs aren't great for transplants for many reasons. For example, the human immune system hates them and attacks them with its full might.
The scientists first cut out three genes that are responsible for irritating the human immune system. They added six human genes to make peace with the human immune system and another three genes that should eliminate the risks of human blood clotting inside the pig organs. Then they cloned piglets from these cells and “deleted” all the instructions that create virus particles that could be dangerous for humans. Again, they took a sample of their cells and cloned new piglets.
Nobody has rebuilt pig DNA to such a degree. The pigs are fully viable, can bear children and laboratory tests show that the human immune system doesn't attack their cells. Further tests showed that human blood doesn't clot excessively in the organs. Now tests in baboons will soon take place and we can just hope that everything will go well. Because if it does we could see first clinical tests on human patients in just a few years.
