16 Jan 2022

Gene-edited pigs changing the organ game

From The Weekend , 8:42 am on 16 January 2022

News broke earlier this week that A US man has become the first person in the world to get a heart transplant from a genetically-modified pig. Doctors in Maryland acknowledged what they were doing was experimental, but the results seem positive so far. It comes after decades of work to get to this point by geneticists, scientists and doctors around the world. One of those people is Dr Paul Tan. 

Tan has been working in the field for 20 years in several different companies. He's currently the Director of NZeno which is working towards breeding pigs with gene-edited kidneys that could be transplanted into humans. It's complex time consuming work, in a field of science which often isn't well understood.