In the late 1990s, a London-based research team confirmed that, at least in a laboratory, PERVs could infect human cells.
The discovery, for a time, “killed xenotransplantation,” said Björn Petersen, a xenotransplantation researcher at the Friedrich Loeffler Institute, the German government’s animal disease research center. “Pharmaceutical companies withdrew their money from the research.”
Throughout the world, the search began for pigs that were as disease free as possible.
In 1998 Diatranz his partner Olga Garkavenko turned on her radio and learned about the new arrivals from Invercargill. She decided to investigate.
The company obtained tissue samples from the quarantined pigs for analysis. Apparently the harsh conditions on the islands had been hard on disease.
“They remained isolated and therefore remained free of many common infections that pigs have,” Tan said. “Pigs that were weak were probably culled. Only the fittest survived.”
Pigs also have unusually low copy numbers of retroviruses in their genome. Petersen noted that the population is also completely free of a type of PERV called PERV-C, which may pose the greatest risk to human transplant recipients. This was possible “because they were isolated for a long time and never had contact with other pigs.”
Joachim Denner, a xenotransplantation researcher at the Free University of Berlin, said the Auckland Island pigs had another big advantage over other pig breeds: their small stature. At around 90 pounds, he said, “they’re just the right size for transplant.” A domestic pig weighs 300 to 700 pounds and its organs, he added, are too large.
In 2004, Elliott, Tan, and others created a company called Living Cell Technologies, or LCT, which took over Diatranz and took over the care of the pigs, building an expensive facility near Invercargill to keep them in medical-grade isolation while they were on their way. cared selectively. bred for xenotransplantation.
Suddenly, the animals housed in quarantine were supposed to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each, much to the barely concealed glee of then-Mayor Shadbolt.
The project brought jobs and millions of dollars of investment to Invercargill. “Everything has come to fruition,” Shadbolt said in 2008. Otago Daily Times article. “I rub it on those people who didn’t support me at every opportunity.”
By the 2010s, concerns around PERVs were waning as multiple judgments of the cell transplants suggested not only that the pig cells could be effective in the treatment of diabetes, but also that PERVs were not transmitted to humans. New gene-editing technology also meant that retrovirus genes could become nonfunctional before an animal was born.
With these advances, the race to successfully implant porcine organs in humans has accelerated. groups all over the world now raise pigs for this purpose. It’s a big deal, a recent report estimated that the global xenotransplantation market could be worth $24.5 billion by 2029.
In January 2022, a group from the University of Maryland, using a pig organ from the American company Revivicor, carried out the first success transplantation of a pig heart to a living patient. The patient survived for two months. While his cause of death is still being investigated, evidence of a disease called porcine cytomegalovirus was found during the autopsy. The pig used in the transplant, Tan said, would have been rigorously tested for the virus, which, she added, shows the importance of raising pigs that are genuinely free of such diseases.
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