NEWS: BBC: Pig cloning advance

[janet paterson <janet313@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Pig cloning advance

Wednesday, 11 April, 2001, 18:01 GMT 19:01 UK - The Scottish-based company
that created Dolly the sheep has now produced a litter of five transgenic
cloned pigs.

PPL Therapeutics says the work is another step towards producing pigs whose
organs could be transplanted into humans.

The company, which worked with the Roslin Institute on Dolly, the first
cloned adult mammal, says all five piglets are healthy.

They are not the first cloned pigs - a previous litter was born last year.
But they are the first pig clones to have a foreign gene added to the cells
from which they were developed.

The success, so far, of this procedure is encouraging the researchers to
believe they may eventually be able to engineer pigs whose organs will not
be rejected if they are transplanted into human patients.

Pigs are among the species favoured for such procedures. Their organs are a
similar size to those of people, they are quite easy to breed, and their
use in scientific and medical procedures does not produce the outcry that
is aroused by experiments on our closest relatives, apes and monkeys.

Pig heart valves are already used to replace faulty human ones, although
rejection can be a problem. But any cross-species organ transplants that
might one day be possible are some way into the future, with technical and
ethical difficulties to be overcome.

The few cloned animals that have been produced so far tend to be unusually
big, to age prematurely, and to have other defects in their development.

There is also concern that transplanting animal organs into humans could
introduce new viruses that might be harmless in the original species but
dangerous to us.


Related to this story:
Scientists produce five pig clones (14 Mar 00 | Sci/Tech)
>From pig clone to human transplant (14 Mar 00 | Sci/Tech)
Cloned pigs: The reaction (14 Mar 00 | Sci/Tech)

Internet links:
PPL Therapeutics


By the BBC's Andrew Craig
BBC News Online: Sci/Tech


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