Wide-eyed piglets rushing to check out the visitors to their unusual barn just might represent the future of organ transplantation – and there’s no rolling around in the mud here. The first gene-edited pig organs ever transplanted into people came from animals born on this special research farm in the Blue Ridge mountains – behind locked gates, where entry requires washing down your vehicle, swapping your clothes for medical scrubs and stepping into tubs of disinfectant to clean your boots between each air-conditioned barn. “These are precious animals,” said David Ayares of Revivicor Inc.
, who spent decades learning to clone pigs with just the right genetic changes to allow those first audacious experiments. The biosecurity gets even tighter just a few miles away in Christiansburg, Virginia, where a new herd is being raised – pigs expected to supply organs for formal studies of animal-to-human transplantation as soon as next year. United Therapeutics’s designated pathogen-free facility in Christiansburg on May 29, 2024.
| Photo Credit:Shelby Lum/AP This massive first-of-its-kind building bears no resemblance to a farm. It’s more like a pharmaceutical plant. And part of it is closed to all but certain carefully chosen employees who take a timed shower, don company-provided clothes and shoes, and then enter an enclave where piglets are growing up.
Behind that protective barrier are some of the world’s cleanest pigs. They breathe air and drink water that’s bet.