Each day, 17 people in the U.S. die waiting to get a new organ. More than 100,000 people are on the nation’s transplant waiting list right now.
“As we’ve been telling you, researchers are now turning to pigs to help fill the gap in the desperate need for organs,” says AgDay TV’s Clinton Griffiths.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN chief medical correspondent, got incredible, rare access to a Midwest research farm that is hoping to fill the gap, Griffiths reports.
“I gotta tell you, I did not know what to expect. It’s powerful just to be here with these pigs,” he told Mike Curtis, CEO of eGenesis, during the interview.
EGenesis chose the Yucatan minipig for its work because when fully grown, their organs are of similar size to human organs, the company said. Their company is one of the biotech firms developing animals for xenotransplantation.
CNN reports to create the pigs, eGenesis starts with a skin sample isolated from the pig and cultures it to expand the cells, then uses CRISPR technology to make 69 edits that insert some human genes and remove some pig genes.
To turn the edited cells into a pig, cloning is required, taking the edited cells and fusing them with a donor egg cell that has had its nucleus removed to create a pig embryo, the article said. That embryo is then transferred to a surrogate sow, and the genetically modified piglets are born by C-section and raised by the eGenesis staff.
Although xenotransplantation still has major steps to take before it’s available to the general public, it provides some hope, experts say.
“That someone has to die for someone to live is a broken paradigm,” Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute and one of the researchers who has been exploring xenotransplantation, said in a CNN article. “I think animals are the answer.”
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New Study Shows Promise for Genetically Modified Pig Organ Transplants
