Transplant organs are scarce. Could growing ones with human cells in pigs alleviate the shortage?
There’s another challenge with growing a humanized organ inside an animal: Organs need room to develop, and if there’s already an existing organ, it’s hard to grow a new version. “There’s no place for it,” says Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at UC Davis, who wasn’t involved in the current study. “So what these researchers tried to do was make space for a human organ to grow inside of an animal.”to knock out two genes in the pig embryos needed for kidney development.
When the embryos were removed, the kidneys had formed structures typical of that stage of development: the fine tubes needed to remove waste and the buds of cells that later turn into ducts that connect the kidney to the bladder. But since the pregnancies were stopped early, it’s unknown whether the kidneys would have continued developing normally and become functioning organs that could be used in transplants.
Knoepfler says the results are exciting, but he raised concerns about the two genes the researchers edited to make the human cells more likely to survive when transplanted:. When these genes are overexpressed, they can cause cancer. He says there would need to be extensive animal testing to determine whether organs grown from these edits could cause cancer if they were transplanted into humans.
For now, scientists are still a long way from growing a fully human organ inside a pig. “Humans diverged from pigs about 80 million years ago, so growing human cells in a pig embryo is a significant—and, at the moment, inefficient—task,” Garry says. Why pigs then, when they differ so much from humans? Scientists think they’d make ideal donor animals for people because of their similar anatomies and organ size. And right now, transplant centers can’t keep up with the demand for organs. The average wait time for a kidney transplant isPig organs can’t simply be transferred into human recipients, though. Pig tissue is swiftly rejected by the human immune system, and pigs also harbor innate viruses that could be passed on to transplant patients.
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