Human porcine chimeric embryos

Release date: 2017-02-06

Recently, an international research team announced in the US "Cell" magazine that they injected human stem cells into pig embryos, and successfully cultivated human pig chimeric embryos for the first time and developed them in pigs for three to four weeks.

Human pig chimera research faces enormous ethical controversy, but scientists believe that this work will ultimately help to develop human organs for transplantation in animals, thus solving the problem of serious shortage of transplanted organs.

"We think this work is of great significance and is a milestone in the field of stem cell research," said Wu Jun, a researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Research, the first author of the paper. "This is the first time that we can cultivate human pigs." Chimeric embryos."

The cultivation of chimeric embryos is divided into two phases. First, using the CRISPR technology known as "genetic scissors", the key genes that form organs in pig embryos are deleted, and genetic "vacancies" are created. Second, human induced pluripotent stem cells are injected into pig embryos. Induced pluripotent stem cells are directly obtained from human somatic cells and have the ability to differentiate into various types of cells as embryonic stem cells.

The blastocyst is an early stage of animal embryo development and is a hollow cell ball. Wu Jun said that they used three different states of induced pluripotent stem cells to implant more than 1,500 porcine blastocysts. After implantation in pigs, these blastocysts develop from 21 to 28 days, and 186 are still alive, in which different states of induced pluripotent stem cells form "unequal degrees of chimerism" in pig embryos, but the overall proportion Lower, "I guess there may be less than one human cell per 100,000 pig cells."

The low proportion of human cells is good news because one of the major concerns about human pig chimerism is that it may be too human, including human cells, that have an impact on pig brain development. In the new study, human cells develop into precursor cells of muscle cells and other tissues and organs, rather than precursor cells of brain cells.

Wu Jun said that ethical concerns are an important issue. They tried their best to solve this problem properly. Therefore, the researchers stopped the pig's pregnancy in the 21st to 28th day of human pig chimera embryo development, which is equivalent to human pregnancy 8 weeks. At 10 weeks, the organ was at an early stage of formation.

Researchers believe that human pig chimeric embryos will help simulate the early onset of many human genetic diseases and conduct drug testing that will eventually lead to human organs for transplantation. Since induced pluripotent stem cells are directly taken from patients who require organ transplantation, the risk of immune rejection after organ transplantation is greatly reduced.

Isspisia, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Research, who is responsible for the study, stressed that this work is an “important first step” but far from the ultimate goal of cultivating transplantable organs. "What we want to know now is the question of 'whether it' or not, that is, whether human cells can contribute to human pig chimeras. Since we got the answer to 'yes', the next challenge is to improve efficiency and guide human cells. Form specific organs in pigs."

Source: Xinhua News Agency

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