One more step on the road to a thousand li

Piglets with crab-eating macaque cages were born in China

Svetlana Yastrebova, N+1

Despite the fact that both of them died in the first week after birth, these animals are the first pigs that went through all embryonic development and had monkey cells in many organs. This is one of the steps towards growing organs for human transplantation in pigs, scientists write in Protein & Cell (Fu et al., Domesticated cynomolgus monkey embryonic stem cells allow the generation of neonatal interspecies chimeric pigs).

In fact, pig embryos with Homo sapiens cells have already been received, but the proportion of human cells in them was very small (about 1 per 100,000) and all embryos had to be destroyed after a month of development. Since human cells were introduced into the pig embryo at an early stage of development, they could later become part of any organ, including the brain. Killing a creature with a human part of the brain is not entirely ethical, so the organ was simply not allowed to develop properly.

Chinese biologists from the Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology Laboratory of the State Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences under the leadership of Tang Hai bypassed this problem. They implanted into the pig blastocyst (one of the early stages of mammalian development) cells not of a human, but of a crab–eating monkey monkey. This monkey is a fairly close relative of humans, but no ethical norms accepted in the scientific community require destroying organisms with its cells. Embryonic stem cells of crab-eating macaques were injected into more than four thousand blastocysts. Then these blastocysts were implanted into the uterus of pigs by in vitro fertilization.

The monkey cells took root in ten pig embryos, but only two of them were born alive and on time. However, both lived less than a week. Researchers attribute this not to the fact that animals are interspecific chimeras, but to complications of in vitro fertilization. One of the arguments in favor of this point of view is that piglets conceived in this way, in which there were no monkey cells, also died quickly: for pigs, the IVF procedure is worse debugged than for humans.

In piglets that survived to birth, monkey cells were found in almost all tissues: their number ranged from 0.0001 to 0.001 of all cells in a separately considered tissue. However, this is already more than in experiments with chimeric pig and human embryos. The authors of the work continue experiments and plan to create organisms with a large percentage of macaque cells.

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