Skip to main content

Scientists in Japan want to grow human pancreases in pigs for transplantation: Report

Yes, you read that headline correctly. According to a recent news report by Xinhua, scientists at the University of Tokyo intend to use human stem cells to grow pancreases inside pigs for future transplantation. The first project in such an endeavour that involves growing of human organs inside animals is expected to begin in about a year’s time. The project is pending approval from government and university committees at the moment.

Hiromitsu Nakauchi, one of the professors at the University of Tokyo leading the experimental transplantation project, says that the team will use human-introduced pluripotent stem cells (or iPS cells) to reproduce pancreases. More specifically, the team will inject human iPS cells into a pig embryo that’s genetically modified to lose the ability to develop a pancreas. The team of scientists will then place the embryo in a surrogate sow’s womb. For reference, a sow is a female pig. The team will then remove the foetus before delivery to study the amount of pancreas tissue derived from the human iPS cells and its ability to function.

The team of scientists in Tokyo hopes that these genetically modified pancreases can be used to treat patients with a serious case of diabetes in a period of ten years. According to Xihua’s report, the Ministry of Education and Science in Japan okayed the controversial research process involving the use of animals as hosts for growing human organs on March 1. The ministry’s decision to approve the undertaking of such a project could potentially open more doors for other Japanese researchers with similar experiments and studies.

That said, the Japanese government reportedly still prohibits the placement of fertilised animal eggs containing human cells in human wombs and the use of animals developed through such genetic engineering for the purpose of breeding. Many questions in the realm of ethics have been raised in the past. Recently, scientists in China injected monkeys with human brain genes in an attempt to create transgenic monkeys and study the evolution of human intelligence.



from Latest Technology News http://bit.ly/2PCJmGj
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Apple Seeds iOS 18.5 Developer Beta 3 Update for iPhone; Public Beta 2 Also Released

Apple on Monday rolled out the iOS 18.5 Developer Beta 3 update to developers and beta testers. It arrives as a minor update for the iPhone with similar features in tow. Alongside, it bundles fixes for a bug that caused black screen to appear on the new Apple Vision Pro. Apple also seeded the iOS 18.5 Public Beta 2 update with a handful of changes compared to the publ... from Gadgets 360 https://ift.tt/ZGYOJvf
Post a Comment
Read more

What if a botched Google search card says you are a serial killer

Many of us have come to heavily rely on Google Search and often don’t question the veracity of information Google cherry-picks from the vast data available on the world wide web for its search cards. This incident, which is one part funny and two parts scary, makes it clear that Google’s Knowlege Graph may not be as sacrosanct as you may have believed.  Hristo Georgiev was informed by a former colleague that a Google search of his name returned a Google Knowlege Graph that depicted his photo and linked it to a Bulgarian rapist and serial killer of the same name, also known as ‘The Sadist’, who murdered five people back in the 1970s and was later executed by shooting.  The graph linked the info to a Wikipedia article, which incidentally had no link to any of Georgiev’s profile or his image. It was Google’s algorithms that erroneously matched the two. What’s even more problematic is that Hristo Georgiev is not a unique name and is shared by hundreds of other people.  As...
Post a Comment
Read more