Genetically Modified Pigs for Human Transplant Factory & the Role of the West and the CCP

Hello, everyone, welcome to “Inconvenient Truths”. I am your host Jennifer Zeng.

 For those who have been following the news about the CCP virus, or COVID19 pandemic, you must have heard about the dangerous gain of function experiments conducted in the Wuhan lab. You might have also wondered, what other crazy things the CCP has done? Well, today I will tell you one of them, that is, raising genetically modified pigs, harvesting their organs and transplanting them into human beings. 

Sounds crazy? The truth is, a huge site, as large as nearly 17 acres, has been built in Sichuan province to produce such pigs on a large scale, and some of them have already been sent to a certain hospital of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences to be used for heart transplant research. 

Before I move on, I’d like to announce that from now on, I will try to take some questions after I finish talking about what I plan to talk about. So if you want to ask questions, please type them in the chat box toward the end of my talk and I will see if I have an answer for you. Please also subscribe to and share my channel if you haven’t. 

An “Organ Factory” of  “Medical Purpose Pigs” 

 Now, let’s move on to our topic today. 

Let’s see a picture of the site I just mentioned. The red Chinese characters say “Clonorgan Biotechnology Site for Medical Purpose Pigs”.  I guess the word “Clonorgan” is the combination of “clone” and “organ”. They clone pig cells to produce pigs for organ harvesting. 

Clonorgan Biotechnology Site for Medical Purpose Pigs

Clonorgan Biotechnology is a company in Chengdu City, Sichuan Province in China. Its website’s home page has this sentence on it: “Building the organ factory of the future, xenotransplantation changes the future”. 

If you don’t know what xenotransplantation is, please look at the screen. It is a medical procedure, whereby animal organs are transplanted into humans.

Anyway, the site of Clonorgan Biotechnology has a variety of functional areas of pig breeding and operating rooms, labs, etc. It is also “a high standard test base for pigs for medical purposes, as well as an organ factory. ” 

A report of Sichuan Daily said this base now has more than 200 pigs with more than 10 kinds of genetic modifications.

A report of Sichuan Daily said this base now has more than 200 pigs with more than 10 kinds of genetic modifications.

The report also said that, “A few days ago, a batch of pigs for medical purposes were shipped from the base to a certain hospital of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences to be used for heart transplant research.”

Pan Dengke, the founder of Clonorgan Biotechnology, said that this kind of scale and factory production of genetically modified pigs could ensure sufficient supply for xenotransplantation, and the price is cheaper than human organs.

He said, “Human organ transplants cost 300,000-400,000 yuan ($47,000-62,000), while the pricing for xenotransplantation is definitely going to be lower than that.” 

Pig Organs Cheaper Than Human Organs? 

 What do you think when you hear him saying that? Why do human organ transplants cost more? Do they buy human organs? If not, why would human organs cost more than pig organs, if human organs are donated free of charge?

The answer is, actually, in CCP’s China, organ transplantation has become a billion dollar industry. You can get an organ in two weeks, even on the same day if you pay enough money. They kill human beings, mainly prisoners of conscience, such as Falun Gong practitioners and Uighurs, and sell their organs. 

While hospitals make huge money by selling organs, I guess they have to buy the organs, as the “raw materials”, from somewhere else, such as the prison system. That’s why Pan Dengke said “human organ transplants cost more than xenotransplantation”, that’s why the idea of raising pigs for medical purposes is so amazing and attractive to these so-called scientists.

Experiments on Monkeys

 This picture from Sichuan Daily explains how they do it: first, abstract pig cells from the pigs, next, knockout Gal antigens from the pig cells, then knockout pig cells from the Gal antigens, then insert some human genes to it, then clone this cell to produce genetically modified pigs. The whole idea is about knocking out elements in the pig cells that will be rejected by the human's immune system.

Another important aspect was to knock out some kind of endogenous retroviruses to eliminate the risk of virus transmission from pigs to humans. That has been achieved in 2017 already. 

In 2019, Pan Dengke’s team transplanted the kidneys of genetically engineered pigs into monkeys and kept the monkeys alive for 32 days while using human clinical immunosuppressants, which are types of drugs used to suppress the rejection of the immune system.  

Pan said this had set a global record for the longest survival of an allogeneic kidney transplant under the same conditions. “Allogeneic transplant” means transplant between different species. 

Why Pigs? 

 According to Pan, pigs were chosen as the source of human organ transplants instead of monkeys because pigs’ organs are similar in size and function to those of humans, and pigs have a short breeding cycle and high reproduction rate.

Another reason is that compared to more intelligent monkeys and orangutans, pigs have fewer ethical issues such as animal rights, and there are no endangered animal protection issues, etc.

Also, for Chinese people, because pork is a main part of their daily meat, they are more tolerant of the practice of killing pigs, and using pigs’ organs than people in Western countries. 

However, Pan may have overlooked the fact that Chinese culture has a lot to say about the spirituality of human beings, so what a transplanted pig heart can bring to a human being may not be as simple as avoiding the transfer of a virus to the human body.

What do you think about this? Feel free to type in a comment.

Yang Luhan and Her Harvard Mentor

 Another team that has been vigorously pursuing this technology is Yang Luhan and her mentor at Harvard Medical School, Professor George Church. 

Let’s see a picture of Yang and a report about her research.  So this is Yang Luhan. 

Now let’s show Picture 8. This is a picture of George Church and a report about his research. 

The CCP mouthpiece Xinhua published a special feature in last September, saying that Chinese scientists had made another breakthrough in xenotransplantation technology in genetically edited pigs, and this report mainly features Yang Luhan.

The report said that the team of Yang Luhan, founder of  Qihan Biotech in Hanzhou city, China, and cofounder and chief scientist of gene-editing company eGenesis in Boston, had created a xenograft with clinical potential, successfully solving two major safety challenges: removing some sort of retroviruses from pigs and enhancing its immunocompatibility.

Yang’s research was also published in Nature Biomedical Engineering last September. Co-authors of this paper include Qihan Biotech, Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, eGenesis in Boston, and Yunnan Agricultural University in China.

 Prior to this, there had been several technological breakthroughs in genetically modifying pigs to make their organs more suitable for human transplantation, several of which resulted from the work of Professor George Church.

In 2015, Yang, along with Church, founded eGenesis in Boston, which received $38 million and $100 million in two rounds of funding in 2017 and 2019, and another $125 million in March this year in a third investment round.

In 2017, eGenesis announced that it had produced the world’s first genetically modified pigs that do not carry endogenous retroviruses, eliminating the risk of virus transmission from pigs to humans; and in 2018, eGenesis produced the first engineered pig, reducing the immune rejection of pig organ transplants.

In addition to the above two issues, there was another technical challenge of functional compatibility: It was not yet known whether the pig organ could perform the hormonal and metabolic balance functions of the original human organ after transplantation.

After resolving these problems, the next step was to conduct a large number of clinical trials. First, pig organs would be transplanted onto monkeys; next, clinical trials would need to be done on human transplants.

Ethical and Regulatory Challenges of Xenotransplantation

 However, the commercialization of pig xenotransplantation faced ethical and regulatory challenges, such as the privacy of transplant recipients, allocation of resources, animal rights, distributive justice, the potential public health risk to humans due to the retrovirus in pigs, and the public and religious acceptance of transplanting animal organs to humans.

The first few items can be resolved through specific improvements and strict regulation, but xenotransplantation seriously increases the risk to public health via diseases. Public acceptance of transplanting animal organs into humans varies widely given cultural and religious backgrounds.

China Can Be the Test Site

 When these challenges became too difficult to resolve, China provided an opportunity, because in China, ethical and legal regulations significantly lag behind technological development. Relevant researches were then moved to China to continue the work.

In 2017, Yang Luhan and Church co-founded Qihan Biotech in China, “with the mission to leverage CRISPR technology to make xenotransplantation a routine medical procedure for the delivery of safe and effective human transplantable cells, tissues and organs.”  

The timing was exactly when clinical trials needed to begin—a stage where ethical review was generally more strict than in the research phase.

Yang Luhan said to Xinhua in 2019, “Technological advances are often ahead of regulation, ethical norms and public acceptance…All technological advances, whether they can be applied to certain scenarios and under what circumstances they can be applied to those scenarios, must be explored on an ongoing basis in order to develop a useful framework that will truly drive technology to change society.”

So did you get her message? Basically she was saying that because technological advances are often ahead of regulations, it is OK to just go ahead with whatever technological advances that she believes are useful and can change society. 

It is indeed the case that the global ethical regulation of new biotechnology, such as xenotransplantation, is generally lagging behind technological development.

However, compared to China’s virtually non-existent and opaque ethical review, the corresponding legal regulations and ethical supervision in the United States are relatively strict. In areas where regulations have not yet caught up, Western research and development generally try not to touch on the more ethically controversial topics.

 And you know what? Unlike the U.S. regulations on genetic modification, which come from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the CCP’s ethical biomedical review is adopted and implemented by the CCP’s National Health and Family Planning Commission—the same agency that has killed hundreds of millions of unborn babies in China over the past 40 years through its controversial one-child policy.

So don’t you think it is a joke to have such an agency to regulate the ethical issues of genetic modification? 

CCP Support

 Despite the numerous controversies surrounding xenotransplantation, the CCP has shown strong support.

For example, in addition to the financial support and the publicity of CCP media, Yang Luhan was selected as one of the World Economic Forum’s 2017 Young Global Leaders, and was added to Fortune’s “China’s Most Influential Women in Business 2020.” 

Meanwhile, the projects that Pan Dengke has been involved in are all funded by the CCP’s key official funds, including the National Key Basic Research and Development Plan, the National High Technology Research and Development Program, and the Beijing Natural Science Foundation, etc. 

Qihan Biotech in Hanzhou is a sister company of eGenesis. On March 29 this year, the company raised an additional $67 million in Series A++ financing with the participation of its strategic investors including Lilly Asia Ventures and Matrix Partners China, as well as its existing shareholders Sequoia Capital and China Merchants Bank. Altogether, it has received more than $100 million investments. 

Also,  according to Chinese media, in 2020, gene editing-related startups in China alone received about 2 billion yuan ($310 million) in funding. 

The Role of the West 

 So what are you thinking after learning all of this? For many things, especially controversial studies, such as the xenotransplantation, gene-editing we talk about, there seems to be a certain pattern: Chinese scientists learn technology from the West, or do the research together with western scientists. When there are things they cannot do in Western countries, they take the  technology back to China and continue to do the research there. 

Sometimes the West even directly gives money to Chinese scientists for them to do some dangerous and  controversial studies. 

We now all know that the US National Institutes of Health  gave $600,000 to Wuhan lab to study whether bat coronaviruses could be transmitted to humans, and (P16)  “bat woman” Shi Zhengli once worked with the University of North Carolina to study the ability of a bat coronavirus surviving and evolving to thrive in a human cell.

Also, for the billion dollar, forced organ harvesting business in China, almost all the Chinese doctors, who may have killed hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people in the past 22 years, all learned their skills from the West. And some western companies keep selling drugs to China and make huge money, as these drugs are needed after the organ transplant.

So, what I want to say to the world is, with the CCP’s evil nature, it doesn’t have respect for human life, or any kind of lives, it dares to do anything. The West is also guilty if it still doesn’t recognize the CCP’s evil and continues to work with the CCP. 

Why is the entire world suffering now?  Everything has its consequences, including appeasing and aiding the CCP.

Expert’s Comment

Sean Lin, a microbiologist and a former lab director of the viral disease branch of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, gave me the following comment after I asked his opinion regarding this matter.

Porcine industry often suffers from waves of economic loss from death or diseases caused by various pathogen infections. The diseases associated with swine often include ringworm, erysipelas, leptospirosis, streptococcosis, campylobacterosis, salmonellosis, cryptosporidiosis, giardiasis, balantidiasis, infection with pathogenic E. coli, brucellosis, as well as diseases caused many viral pathogens such as swine influenza virus, swine fever virus, porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV), etc. So, one of the major risks associated with xenotransplantation with pig organs is whether the recipients would become more susceptible to various infections, or whether the recipients would carry swine-related pathogens that are with pig organs prior to the xenotransplant.

In addition, scientists do not always know the full spectrum of the consequences of genetic editing. For example, PRRSV is a nasty infection that causes huge economic losses across Europe, Asia, and North America. PRRSV uses CD163 receptor, which is the receptor for the hemoglobin-haptoglobin complex or hemoglobin alone. Scientists have used genetic editing tools to knock down or alter CD163 in pig embryos and the pig offspring becomes resistant to PRRSV infection. However, one potential consequence is that the genetically edited pig might become more vulnerable for other bacteria infection since CD163 functions as an innate immune sensor for some gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria.

The scary part of the work done by scientists at Qihan Biotech and eGenesis is the extensive genetic editing (13 genes and 42 alleles) without comprehensive knowledge on the multifaceted consequence of the edits. The porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs) genes were inactivated in this experiment, but it is not known whether this would lead to any aberrant expression of partial viral genes or host genes. This experiment used a combination of CRISPR–Cas9 and transposon technologies to eliminate three xenoantigens and to express nine human transgenes that enhance the pigs’ immunological compatibility and blood-coagulation compatibility with humans. Although the engineered pigs exhibit normal physiology and fertility, it is not clear whether the engineered pigs can lead to unexpected cell or organ damages and pathogenesis associated with dysregulated coagulation.

The Chinese government has invested heavily to drive forward the gene editing experiments, just as they carried out the political “Great-Leap forward” movement in history. Xenotransplants from pigs to primates are subject to vigorous immunologic rejection involving both innate and adaptive immune responses. It is unavoidable that more extensive genetic editing will need to be engineered down this road. And since the bioethics review process is nearly nonexistent in national priority projects driven by Chinese regime, the paramount risk is that xenotransplantation to humans could be prematurely conducted, based on limited knowledge on xenotransplant of pig organs to non-human primates.

Well, that’s all what I plan to say for today. Now, let me see if any of you have any questions.

7/5/2021 *

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