A photo from open sources
John Craig Venter, a renowned American specialist in genetics, in 2010 describing the human genome, head of Synthetic Genomics Inc, teams up with specialists from United Therapeutics Corp to create new, genetically modified pigs whose lungs could be transplanted to humans.
According to both companies, in the United States alone, from different About 400 thousand people die of lung cancer every year. But only 2 thousand of them can be saved with a lung transplant. Previous attempts to help people with animal organs failed, tissue rejected by the human body, there were blood clots.
The reasons for the failures were differences in the genome. The genome of people pigs and the majority of mammals is 90% identical, therefore the task of scientists is find out what needs to be changed in the remaining 10% to avoid organ rejection.
For starters, scientists are reassembling and with the highest possible accurately analyze the pig’s genome and then compare it with human. Then it is planned to change the pig genome and create pork embryos that grow with lungs more like human.
If everything goes well, then the changed cells will appear already in the next few years. To test and make sure that the organs are safe for humans will take significantly more time. Scientists are not going to dwell on the lungs. If this part of the research goes well, they’ll begin trying to do the same for the heart and kidneys.
And it is entirely possible that scientists will succeed. Last week scientists from the National Institute of Heart, Lung and Blood (USA) spoke about a successful heart transplant genetically modified pig baboon.
USA
