De-extinction is a distinctly modern fantasy: the extremely appealing idea that we can, with just some pipettes and computers, undo the destruction we continue to cause the natural world. So it’s fitting that the first animal whose creation Colossal announced was a dire wolf — an animal that exists, in the public imagination, primarily as…
Surgeons removed a genetically engineered pig’s kidney from an Alabama woman after she experienced acute organ rejection, NYU Langone Health officials said on Friday. Towana Looney, 53, lived with the kidney for 130 days, which is longer than anyone else has tolerated an organ from a genetically modified animal. She has resumed dialysis, hospital officials…
InGame of Thrones, Jon Snow’s direwolf Ghost was more than a pet. He was the embodiment of loyalty, survival, and bone-crunching badassery. When Colossal Biosciences said they had brought back direwolves, people got excited. Ghost is back! The North remembers! Science wins!Well… no.What Colossal did was sort of like bringing back the direwolf — if…
Researchers have corrected a disease-causing gene mutation with a single infusion carrying a treatment that precisely targeted the errant gene. This was the first time a mutated gene has been restored to normal. The small study of nine patients announced Monday by the company Beam Therapeutics of Cambridge, Mass., involved fixing a spelling error involving…
How have the first patients fared after receiving organ transplants from genetically modified pigs? Roni Caryn Rabin, a health reporter on the Science desk of The New York Times, looks at the results so far. Source link
More than 100,000 Americans are on waiting lists for donor organs, most needing a kidney. Only 25,000 human donor kidneys become available each year. Twelve Americans on the kidney list die every day on average. Scientists first transplanted genetically engineered pig organs into other animals and then to brain-dead human patients. In 2022, researchers received…
Surgeons in Boston successfully transplanted the kidney of a genetically modified pig into a 66-year-old man with kidney failure last month, Massachusetts General Hospital announced on Friday. It was the fourth pig kidney transplant in the United States, and the first of three that will be done at Mass General as part of a new…