Gene editing will solve the problem of donor organs
Pigs will be turned into ideal organ donors for humans
American scientists have promised to make pig organs suitable for human transplantation. With the help of a new method of genetic engineering CRISPR/Cas9, they modified many genes in pig embryos, which facilitated (so in the text, in fact, relief is still very far away – VM) the transplantation of their organs into the human body. Popular Science (With Gene Editing, Pigs Could Be The Perfect Organ Donor) reports on the discovery with reference to the report of geneticist George Church at the seminar of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.
Church (an employee of Harvard University and one of the founders of the biotechnology company eGenesis) named two main reasons for the incompatibility of pig transplants with the human body. Firstly, these organs often infect the recipient with dangerous endogenous retroviruses included in the genetic code of the pig. Therefore, Church modified 62 genes in the embryos of experimental creatures – this is almost ten times more than other scientists managed to change.
In addition, the human immune system actively rejects organs transplanted from pigs, which is why transplant patients now have to take immunosuppressants all their lives. To solve this problem, Church and his colleagues corrected 20 genes that ensure the work of proteins on the surface of cells that cause an acute immune reaction.
Now scientists are moving on to the next stage: they will combine both complexes of edited genes in one embryo and place the fetus in the uterus of a pig. They also plan to minimize the cost of organs suitable for transplantation – eGenesis has opened a special sterile pigsty at Harvard for this purpose.
Church's discovery also provides new opportunities for the genetic modification of human embryos (to combat hereditary diseases), about the ethical and medical safety of which scientists actively argued in 2015. So, in March, Chinese scientists modified the genome of human embryos using the same CRISPR/Cas9, and the number of errors in the tool exceeded all expectations.
The CRISPR/Cas9 method allows using highly specific enzymes to cut out the "wrong" sections of genes and change them to normal sequences. The system by which this is possible is present in most bacteria. With the help of CRISPR enzymes, you can change the structure of the desired DNA in any desired place, multiply this DNA in bacteria and then use viral vectors to introduce it into the necessary cells, changing their genome as required.
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08.10.2015