Biologists Show New Prospects for Growing Human Replacement Organs in Animals Nicholas Wade - The New York Times
go to original January 27, 2017

A pig embryo at four weeks, which had been injected with human stem cells (Salk Institute)

For the first time, biologists have succeeded in growing human stem cells in pig embryos, shifting from science fiction to the realm of the possible the idea of developing human organs in animals for later transplant.

The approach involves generating stem cells from a patient’s skin, growing the desired new organ in a large animal like a pig, and then harvesting it for transplant into the patient’s body. Since the organ would be made of a patient’s own cells, there would be little risk of immune rejection.

The human-organ-growing pigs would be examples of chimeras, animals composed of two different genomes. They would be generated by implanting human stem cells into an early pig embryo, resulting in an animal composed of mixed pig and human cells.

One team of biologists, led by Jun Wu and Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte at the Salk Institute, has shown for the first time that human stem cells can contribute to forming the tissues of a pig, despite the 90 million years of evolution between the two species.

Another group, headed by Tomoyuki Yamaguchi and Hideyuki Sato of the University of Tokyo, and Hiromitsu Nakauchi of Stanford, has reversed diabetes in mice by inserting pancreas glands composed of mouse cells that were grown in a rat. The Salk team’s report is published in Thursday’s issue of Cell and the Stanford-Tokyo team’s in Wednesday’s issue of Nature.

The two reports together establish the feasibility of trying to grow replacement human organs in animals, though such a goal is still far off.

Read the rest at The New York Times

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