Scientists in the US have just taken a major step in their journey to growing human organs in animals, by creating human-pig embryos.
A team at the Salk Institute used stem cell technology to create the human-pig hybrid embryos, known as ‘chimeras’.
The aim of their project is to one day grow and harvest human tissue and organs for transplant.
As part of the experimentation, researchers injected human tissue and organ cells into the embryo of a pig. The embryo was then implanted into the uterus of a female pig, and left to grow.
Four weeks later, the stem cells had developed into what has been termed the ‘precursors’ of human tissues, including the heart and liver.
While the results were found to be ‘inefficient’, this marks a major step forward in what is a very significant piece of research.
Writing in the research report in Cell, Dr Jun Wu of the Salk Institute explained: “Species evolve independently, and many factors dictating the developmental programmes might have diverged, which makes it difficult to blend cells from one species to a developing embryo from another.”
“The larger the evolutionary distance, the more difficult for them to mix.”
