New Life for Pig-to-Human Transplants

November 11, 2015

(Nature) – Robin Pierson heads the Maryland lab, which has performed about 50 pig-to-primate transplants like this one to test different combinations of genetic modifications in the pig and immune-suppressing drugs in the primate. Even so, the team has not had a primate survive for longer than a few days. The complexities of the immune system and the possibility of infection by pig viruses are formidable and drove large companies out of the field in the early 2000s. That trend may now be reversing, thanks to improved immunosuppressant drugs and advances in genome-editing technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9.