University of California CRISPR-Cas9 Human Organs in Pigs means Human Chimeras Possible

“Human pluripotent cells are introduced into non-human vertebrate animal pre-gastrulation stage embryos”

NIH position on the use of Human-pig hybrids and CRISPR-Cas9 in animal testing

There is now a global shortage of Human Organs for human transplant surgeries. So what if you could grow them from scratch instead of getting them?

Researchers from the University of California are now attempting to grow human organs in pigs as reported in the article “Growing Human Organs Inside Pigs”, published June 6, 2016 By Dyllan Furness, Digitaltrends.

The idea is very simple; inject human stem cells into the embryos of pigs which then grow into organs tissue. Humans and pigs have similar physiologies, so growing human organs in pigs is a logically sound idea....to scientists, at least!

It also sounds a lot like the potential outcome of the research into cloning livestock that a company in China named BoyaLife may achieve, as they too can do the same thing as predicted in my blog article entitled “Why BoyaLife plan to clone farm animals will lead to cloning Humans”.

So how did the researchers from the University of California achieve this technical marvel?

University of California grow human organs in Pigs - CRISPR-Cas9 to make human babies in animals

The researchers use the gene editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 to remove a part of the freshly fertilized pig embryo’s DNA that instructs it to grow a certain organ. In my example, I'll use kidneys, being as they are high in demand on transplant and have one of the longest donor waiting lists.

Then human stem cells, which are cells that are undifferentiated i.e. not developed into functional cells with a specific purpose, are injected into the pig embryo. The mechanism that causes the cells to divide, upon spotting the gene sequence for the kidney removed, would then take the human stem cell DNA for the human kidney and use it to fill the gap in the pig embryo’s DNA.

In so doing, a pig/human chimera develops. But instead of growing into a fully formed pig, it hi-jacks the entire process and causes the pig embryo to grow into a human organ inside the pig. In essence, the pig give birth to a human kidney, not a pig, a concept in itself that's so frightening, I had difficulty writing.

Still the potential is huge; potentially, any human organ or tissue can be grown this way. During their research, the scientist terminates the pregnancy in 28 days after conception in order to study the embryonic tissue and stay within legal limit imposed on stem cell research.

However, this opens the possibility that a fully formed baby can be grown outside of a woman’s womb in a pig body as I’d predicted in my blog article entitled “Why Dr. Kathy Niakan of Francis Crick Institute Gene Editing means Automated Human Birth”.

 Hence the reason why the NIH (National Institute of Health) and other US Government agencies are not funding their research; there is a genuine fear that before 2020, designed babies born in-vitro outside of a female human womb may be possible. Pigs, being as their physiologies are similar to ours, make the perfect host for such human/pig chimeras babies.

With the NIH not supporting the research of the University of California, it remains to be seen how far their research will progress.