- cross-posted to:
- news@kbin.social
- biology
- technews@radiation.party
- cross-posted to:
- news@kbin.social
- biology
- technews@radiation.party
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The research involved creating human-pig chimeric embryos containing a combination of human and pig cells.
When transferred into surrogate pig mothers, the developing embryos were shown to have kidneys that contained mostly human cells, marking the first time that scientists have grown a solid humanised organ inside another animal.
The kidneys were not entirely human as they included vasculature and nerves made mostly from pig cells, meaning they could not be used for transplantation in their current form.
Prof Dusko Ilic, a stem cell scientist at King’s College London, who was not involved in the research, described the work as pioneering but said any clinical applications would not happen in the foreseeable future.
“We found that if you create a niche in the pig embryo, then the human cells naturally go into these spaces,” said Prof Zhen Dai of Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, another senior author.
“We would probably need to engineer the pigs in a much more complex way and that also brings some additional challenges,” said Miguel Esteban, also of the Guangzhou institute and a senior author.
The original article contains 605 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!