The company that cloned Dolly the sheep has reached another milestone: the birth of the world's first transgenic cloned piglets.
PPL Therapeutics said in early April that five healthy piglets have been born, each of which has a foreign marker gene introduced into its DNA structure. PPL announced last year that it had produced the world's first cloned pigs, but the birth of the new piglets is important because it represents the first time piglets were produced from cells that had been genetically modified.
"The work demonstrates the commercial potential of nuclear transfer in the generation of transgenic pigs and is a major further step in achieving PPL's xenograft objective to make modified pigs whose organs and cells can be successfully transplanted into humans," PPL said in a statement.
PPL estimated that clinical trials involving xenotransplantation with pig organs could start in four or five years.
With the birth of Dolly in July 1996, PPL, along with the Roslin Institute, became the first company to clone an adult mammal. PPL later became the first company to achieve gene knock-out in livestock. In February, PPL scientists said they may have found a way to avoid using embryos in stem cell research; such an approach could circumvent ethical concerns about using cells that must be taken from human embryos. (See TNN, March 1, 2001, "Dolly Scientists Convert Skin Cells to Heart Cells; Nobel Laureates Urge Bush to Fund Stem Cell Research.")
PPL Therapeutics is based in Scotland, but the bulk of its work involving xenografts is conducted in Blacksburg, Virginia.
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