David Ayares runs a biotech company in southwestern Virginia that plans to use cloned farm animals to provide kidneys, hearts and livers to save thousands of people who need transplants.
“We’ve been working on this for more than 20 years. And it’s no longer a science fiction experiment,” he says. “It’s actually a reality.”
“We have 22 buildings and a census of pigs — around 300 pigs — all for research purposes.” Outsiders can enter the buildings with pigs in them only with hospital scrubs, to protect the pigs from pathogens.
“It’s a barrier facility. So we’re trying to protect the pigs, not us.”
To get into the farm, you have to drive your vehicle through an outdoor car wash to disinfect the vehicle, and then stop at a locked security gate surrounded by a tall chain-link fence.
If you enter the pig barns, you have to wear boots and put them in a metal tub filled with disinfecting fluid to sterilize the boots before entering. As a reporter who visited one of them noted, “Inside, the air is filled with the sound of snorting, grunting, squealing pigs and piglets. We find seven adult females in separate pens. Four of the pigs are pregnant with cloned pig embryos that were genetically modified. The other three are suckling litters of modified piglets.”
“This is the farrowing facility where the newborn piglets are born,” Ayares says. “All of these piglets are genetically modified.”
His biotech company is called Revivicor. It creates genetically modified cloned animals. “Inside a brick and glass building in an office park, scientists start by using the latest genetic engineering techniques to edit the DNA in pig skin cells. Next, the scientists employ a technique similar to that used to create the first cloned mammal — Dolly the sheep — to make cloned pig embryos. (Revivicor created the world’s first cloned pigs.)”
During a recent visit by a reporter, “four scientists methodically remove most of the genes from hundreds of pig eggs. They do it by gingerly piercing the egg with a tiny pipette under a microscope to suction out the DNA. Later that day, the scientists inject the edited pig skin cells inside the eggs’ outer membrane. Finally, the scientists zap the combination of cells with two electric shocks to fuse the edited cells with the emptied eggs and then start cell division to create an embryo. The resulting embryos are surgically implanted into the wombs of adult female pigs. Four months later, cloned piglets are born with 10 genetic modifications designed to make sure their organs don’t grow too big, won’t cause complications like blood clots and won’t be rejected by the human immune system.”
“Every cell in the body of this animal has those same genetic modifications. And when we procure an organ from them, like every other cell, it’s carrying the desired genetic modification that will be used for organ transplant,” says Ayares. “Their hearts, their kidneys, their lungs, their livers — all have the 10 genetic modifications so that they’ll be compatible for transplant.”
Earlier, the New York Post had an interesting article about “How pigs will save thousands of human lives through organ transplants.” Right now, there are just not enough organs for all the people who need one, resulting from people dying to the lack of functioning hearts, livers, and kidneys,
“Nearly 107,000 Americans are waiting for a lifesaving organ transplant; 90,000 of them are hoping for a kidney. The demand for organs clearly exceeds the supply,” noted science writer Ronald Bailey in 2022.
Another way to make more organ transplants available would be to pay people to donate a kidney, or to give people incentives to become organ donors upon their death (such as listing themselves as future organ donors on their driver’s licenses). Similarly, ending the ban on kidney sales would save thousands of lives annually.
Back in 2011, kidney donor Alexander Berger explained why kidney sales should be legal in The New York Times. Berger was a researcher for GiveWell, a nonprofit that helps charitable donors decide where to give. Berger predicted that allowing kidney donors to be compensated would save countless lives by giving people an incentive to donate their kidneys, resulting in a vast increase in kidney donations.
Right now, people have to be unusually altruistic to donate a kidney, since you have to spend several days in the hospital to donate one, take off a lot of time from work, and run a tiny risk of death. Few people are that selfless. Allowing kidney sales would also help the poor, who currently often are unable to obtain kidneys: as Berger notes, people unable to get kidney transplants now are “disproportionately African-American and poor.” Kidney sales would also save taxpayers money, because years of dialysis is so much more expensive than a transplant, and dialysis is commonly paid for by the taxpayers through Medicaid and other government programs.
