Organ transplant has always been a big challenge in the medical world. The hands who do the transplant are always there, specialists are always available, the biggest issue that organ transplantation faces is the lack of organs to use. Hundreds of people are listed under needing organs but unfortunately the amount of healthy organs available is scarce.
Organ transplant is not an easy task; there are tests wherein the organ being donated and the transplant patient have to be a match in order to have minimal percentage of rejection. In addition, perfectly matched organs are not easily found. Now, researchers from Harvard have found a way to tweak pigs' genes, which is critical to making the pig-to-human transplant a reality.
Pigs have retrovirus in their genes, which when transferred to humans can cause a disease, but Harvard's biologists found a way to genetically engineer 62 gene points in the pig's DNA that will turn off the virus completely. The researchers used a gene editing technique called CRISPR-Cas9, commonly known as CRISPR. The technique uses the natural defense mechanisms of an organism, take for example, a bacteria, to target specific pieces of DNA in a genome. With this, the researchers are able to crop out or replace individual sequences in the DNA.
Transplanting heart valves and skin from pigs to humans has been highly successful many years before, but the fact that the pigs have the retrovirus makes it impossible for whole organ transplants. The deletion of the 62 gene points in the DNA of the pig is the greatest deletion done by CRISPR technique yet. But the researchers are hopeful that they will be able to find a way to make whole organ transplants from pig to man possible. The researchers have not yet tested the engineered DNA in humans yet, but in a petri dish, human cells showed a 1,000 fold reduction in retrovirus transmission with the edited pig cells.