The 1,820 embryos, implanted in 13 surrogate sows, were allowed to grow for 28 days – the first trimester of a pig pregnancy.
When they were removed, the kidneys were found to have normal structure and tubule formation and were in the second stage of development.
Scientists ultimately hope to use the technology for human organ transplants, but they have stressed that more work needs to be done.
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Miguel Esteban, of China’s Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, said: “We would probably need to engineer
the pigs in a much more complex way and that also brings some additional challenges. Before we get to that late state of making organs on the shelf for clinical practice, this method provides a window for studying human development.
“You can trace the human cells you’re injecting and manipulate them so that you can study diseases and how cell lineages are formed.” Although similar methods have been used to generate human tissues, previous attempts to grow human organs in pigs have not proved successful.
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Pig and human cells compete with each other, so researchers removed two genes from pig embryos to create a genetic “niche” or “void” that enables the foetus to grow human kidneys.
They then engineered human stem cells – which can potentially become any type of tissue in the body – to make them more develop more easily in the pig embryo.
The research was published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
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