Generation of Genetically Engineered Pigs Using Genome Editing Techniques for Biomedical Research

The generation of transgenic animal is becoming an important strategy for the biomedical and pharmaceutical research. Although rodent models are routinely used in this research field, they do not proper in certain circumstances. Because the various differences between human and rodent in the anatomy, pathology, physiology, immunology, neurology, and metabolism could be cause to fail in the reproducibility of efficacy and the clinical approach, the interest about the large animal model to mimics human conditions is increasing. Many researchers consider that large animals like pigs are more suitable to reflect the human conditions because of their similarity with human. In addition, transgenic pigs are considered as the sources of xenotransplantation. On the other hand, emerging genome editing techniques such as ZFN, TALEN, and CRISPR/Cas9 system are useful to modify the genome relatively easy. Recently many researchers are having an interest and using these techniques for various purposes. Furthermore, a large number of research articles related with genome editing techniques are published in last few years. The use of genome editing technique can lead to increase the efficiency and reduce the time and the cost in the generation of transgenic pigs.

Now, we are trying to generate the genetically engineered pigs for biomedical research. We focus on the three categories as follows; source animal of xenotransplantation, human disease model, and disease resistant animal model. In here, I will introduce the usage of CRISPR/Cas9 system in transgenic pig and the progress of transgenic pig production in our research group.