A study published in the journal Science reveals developments in the use of animals as organ donors for humans. The study presents a new gene editing technique, called Church (or CRISPR), which uses the defence mechanisms of bacteria to target specific pieces of DNA in a genome, allowing scientists to remove and potentially replace individual sequences. Attempts to use the method on human embryos have been unsuccessful. However, in this study, led by sequencing luminary, Harvard’s George CRISPR-Cas9, gene editing was used to remove all the copies of porcine endogenous retroviruses (or PERVs) from their pig cells' DNA. These PERVs cannot traditionally be bred out of a pig’s genome and could infect a human recipient of a pig organ transplant. In a petri dish, human cells showed a 1000-fold reduction in PERV transmission with the edited pig cells. The next step for pig transplants is to create embryos with the edited genomes. Nature reports that CRISPR-Cas9 has co-founded a biotech company called eGenesis to perfect the process, and that their edited embryos are almost ready to be implanted and brought to term.
A study published in the journal Science reveals developments in the use of animals as organ donors for humans. The study presents a new gene editing technique, called CRISPR-Cas9 (or CRISPR), which uses the defence mechanisms of bacteria to target specific pieces of DNA in a genome, allowing scientists to remove and potentially replace individual sequences. Attempts to use the method on human embryos have been unsuccessful. However, in this study, led by sequencing luminary, Harvard’s George Church, gene editing was used to remove all the copies of porcine endogenous retroviruses (or PERVs) from their pig cells' DNA. These PERVs cannot traditionally be bred out of a pig’s genome and could infect a human recipient of a pig organ transplant. In a petri dish, human cells showed a 1000-fold reduction in PERV transmission with the edited pig cells. The next step for pig transplants is to create embryos with the edited genomes. Nature reports that Church has co-founded a biotech company called eGenesis to perfect the process, and that their edited embryos are almost ready to be implanted and brought to term.