Chinese scientists grow humanised kidneys in pigs for the first time

Chinese scientists have achieved a significant breakthrough by successfully growing humanized kidneys containing human cells in pigs for the first time. This achievement could potentially address organ donation shortages in the future.

The experiment involved the creation of human-pig chimeric embryos, which contained a mix of human and pig cells. These embryos were then transferred into surrogate pig mothers. The study detailing this breakthrough was published in the journal “Cell Stem Cell.”

However, the kidneys produced were not entirely human; they still included vasculature and nerves primarily composed of pig cells, making them unsuitable for transplantation in their current state. It remains uncertain whether current genetic engineering techniques can produce fully human organs.

The researchers from the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health focused on growing kidneys, as they are among the most commonly transplanted organs in human medicine. Previous attempts to grow human organs in pigs had failed, primarily because pig cells tended to dominate and outcompete human cells during development, resulting in chimeras that were mostly pig.

The Chinese scientists overcame this challenge by genetically modifying a single-cell pig embryo to lack two genes crucial for kidney development. This modification created a niche within the embryo that could be filled by human embryonic stem cells, effectively integrating human cells into the pig embryo.

While this achievement marks a significant milestone and the first successful endeavor to grow entire organs with human cells in pigs, experts have expressed concerns about the proportion of human cells within the generated kidneys. According to Darius Widera, a professor of stem cell biology at the University of Reading in England, the proportion of human cells in these kidneys is still not high enough to meet transplantation standards.

Nonetheless, this breakthrough holds promise for advancing research into human organ growth within animal hosts, which could eventually help address the critical shortage of organs available for transplantation.