German scientists plan to clone and then breed this year genetically modified pigs to serve as heart donors for humans, based on a simpler version of a U.S.-engineered animal used last month in the world's first pig-to-human transplant.
Eckhard Wolf, a scientist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, said his team aimed to have the new species, modified from the Auckland Island breed, ready for transplant trials by 2025.
Wolf, who has been researching animal-to human-transplants - known as xenotransplants - for 20 years, said his team would use still inefficient cloning technology to generate only "the founder animals", from which future genetically identical generations would be bred. Transplants are used for people diagnosed with organ failure who have no other treatment options, a waiting list that numbered around 8,500 people in Germany at the end of 2021, according to data from the country's Organ Transplantation Foundation.
In February 2019, a petition by German pressure group Doctors Against Animal Experiments demanding a ban on xenotransplantation research collected over 57,000 signatures.
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