Scientists create pig-human 'mutants' for organ harvesting

In a remarkable yet controversial feat, scientists just a few days ago announced that they had created the first ever successful human-animal hybrids.

The projects set out to prove that human cells could be introduced into non-human organisms, not only limited to that but survive and even grow inside host animals and in this case, pigs!

According to a well-known international consensus every ten minutes, a person is added to the organ transplant waiting list and every day, 22 people on that list die without the organ they need. Now these new human-pig chimeras are setting up to solve precisely that!

An international team of researchers led by the esteemed SALK institute has created what is called a chimera in scientific cliques, which is basically an organism that contains cells from two different species.

In ancient civilizations, chimeras were associated with God, and our ancestors thought the chimeric form can guard humans. In a sense, thats what the team hopes human-animal hybrids will one day do, says Jun Wu the lead study author at the Salk institute.

As far as the process is concerned there are two ways to make a chimera, the first dictates that organs from one animal be transplanted to another, but that is a risky ordeal as many a time the hosts immune system may reject the donated organ.

The lateral however, is that one animals cells be introduced into another organism at the embryonic level and letting the two grow together into a hybrid ergo a chimera.

Initially, Juan Carlos Belmonte, a professor at the SALK institutes gene expression division, was opinionated of the fact that the concept of using a host embryo to grow foreign organs seemed simple enough; however, it took him and his team more than 40 collaborators and four years to figure out a way to make a human-animal chimera.

Pigs being somewhat close to the genetic and DNA make up of humans qualified for this test, however there are concerns that certain diseases could be carried out in the harvested organ, so the scientists took to their gene-editing CRISPR tool to hack out any potentially ailing elements.

Even at this early stage, Wu calls the work a breakthrough: There are other steps to take, he concedes. But its intriguing. Very intriguing.