North Carolina State University researcher Jorge Piedrahita's ongoing experiments with cloned pigs may soon help to combat a number of genetic diseases, especially Intrauterine Growth Retardation, a birth defect which causes low birth weight and can lead to problems such as heart disease and diabetes later in life.
Piedrahita and colleagues plan to work with medical researchers at Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to further investigate IUGR, although Piedrahita would not confirm more specifics of the collaboration.
Piedrahita has cloned over 50 pigs in the last three years, mostly at Texas A&M University. Five pigs he cloned in December at NCSU were the first pigs cloned in the state of North Carolina.
"We're interested in genetic modifications because they're associated with a whole range of human disease," he said. "About five percent of human births have Intrauterine Growth Retardation. What we're seeing is some cloned animals have symptoms very similar to that, and now we can use that model to understand [IUGR] genetically."
Piedrahita initially became involved in cloning the pigs to study their value as transgenic animals, which are animals that may be used to donate organs to humans. Now, he has become interested in studying the problems that arise in cloned animals in order to apply his work to human medicine. IUGR, for example, is observed much higher in cloned pigs than naturally born pigs.
"We are trying to understand the genetic modifications that are occurring in these cloned animals and taking that information in," Piedrahita said.
The team at NCSU created the cloned pigs by taking skin cells from a pig and "reprogramming" their genetic code. Piedrahita took and manipulated the skin cells so that they would function as fetus cells and would grow into a new pig.
"[Cloning] makes it possible to develop animals with certain kinds of genetic makeup that will be incredible for biomedical research," said Neil Olson, associate dean for research of the NCSU College of Veterinary Medicine. "[Piedrahita's research] will help us to understand the role of hereditary nature of disease as opposed to environmental differences."
Olson, who was responsible for bringing Piedrahita and his team to NCSU from Texas A&M, also said that the benefits of the knowledge gained from cloning and the potential to use cloned animals as organ donors outweigh any moral qualms.
"Of course there are ethical issues [in cloning]," he said. "But those who would raise that issue would also want to look at the opposite--the otherwise healthy people unable to survive because of an unavailability of organs. That kind of benefit for humanity is far greater in my mind."
Olson also said cloning might help to engineer animals that would be immune to infectious diseases such as Foot and Mouth and Mad Cow disease.
Piedrahita came to NCSU to have access to medical school facilities and with the intention of collaboration with Duke and UNC researchers. Cooperation with both teams of researchers will focus on IUGR, using information from the cloned pigs to look at human disorders.
"Collaborating with Duke and UNC is something that makes sense, and I'd like to see that done, something that I'd encourage," said John Gilligan, vice chancellor for research of NCSU. "Doing joint projects in the field of cloning would be very natural and important."
Piedrahita arrived at NCSU in July 2002, but had to wait about eight months for the half million dollar research lab to be fully updated. The cloning research costs several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, Olson said, and was financed mostly by a grant from the National Institute of Health.
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