Poised to be first widely consumed gene-edited animals, virus-resistant pigs trot toward market

Pigs, cattle, and other livestock with edited genes are still far from most dinner plates, but a U.K. company has taken a big step toward the supermarket by engineering several commercial breeds of pigs to be resistant to a virus that devastates the swine industry. The firm, Genus plc, hopes that by year’s end the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will formally approve the pigs for widespread human consumption, a first for a gene-edited animal. Alison Van Eenennaam, an animal geneticist at the University of California, Davis, is cheering the news. “There’s no point having a pig getting sick and dying if there’s an approach to genetically prevent it from doing so,” she says, adding that this benefits farmers, the pigs, and, ultimately, the consumer. But Van Eenennaam laments the regulatory hoops the company is having to jump through. FDA views the DNA change made by the genome editor CRISPR as an “investigational new drug” that requires multiple submissions from Genus to establish the altered gene’s safety, ability to be inherited, and stability over generations, as well as the resulting pigs’ resistance to the virus. “You’re talking about a very, very expensive regulatory pathway,” she says, arguing it is unnecessary because unlike genetically modified organisms, to which DNA from other species has been added, the gene editing involved the pigs’ own DNA, creating changes that could happen naturally. The gene edit made by Genus...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news