Genetically Modified Pigs

Hammersmith Hospital research moves to US to escape red tape

A Hammersmith Hospital fertility expert is moving a potentially ground-breaking research project to the US to get away from red tape.

Lord Winston wants to breed genetically modified pigs, whose organs could then be transplanted into humans.

Scientists want to introduce human genes into the animals to reduce the chances of the organs being rejected by patients' bodies.

But Winston says he is moving the research project from Britain to America because British regulations and a shortage of funding make it too difficult to carry out experiments here: “This technology is important for human medicine. As a bonus, it carries huge commercial opportunities if we develop and export it around the world.

"However, it has been difficult to pursue the research in the UK. Getting a Home Office licence to experiment with just six pigs took nearly two years with successive delays, even though the pigs do not suffer,” he wrote in the Sunday Times

“Our US friends will benefit from our technology and yet another British innovation will be jeopardised; the income we might have generated for Britain will be lost,” he added.

Winston says he expects the technique to provide a solution to the shortage of donor organs within 10 years as almost 8,000 British patients are waiting for livers, hearts and kidneys.

Explaining in the Sunday Times why the research was so important, he wrote: “Artificial, human-made devices, like mechanical hearts, never work as well as biologically produced organs. And although huge publicity has recently been given to the idea of growing organs, culturing hearts and livers possibly from stem cells, this technology is still very primitive and is unlikely to come to fruition in the next 20 to 30 years.

“Pigs’ organs are the right size for human transplantation and they work similarly to human organs.”

Responding to Lord Winston's comments, a Home Office spokesperson said: "The creation, breeding and use of transgenic animals for scientific or experimental purpose is allowable under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 and many such licences involving rodents have been authorised and are in use in the UK.

"All requests for such licence authorities are considered on a case by case basis and authorised by the Secretary of State only after having weighed the likely adverse effects on the animals concerned against the benefits likely to accrue as a result of the proposed programme of work."

Lord Winston heads the Institute of Reproductive and Developmental Biology at Hammersmith Hospital.

10 September 2008