First Sheep-Human Hybrid developed in the lab: Know all about it

Representation Image of a normal Sheep

Researchers just made a new kind of chimaera. They produced a sheep-human hybrid embryo in hopes of producing human organs one day for the medical purpose. In the medical world, a chimaera is an organism which contains a mixture of genetically different

Researchers just made a new kind of chimaera. They produced a sheep-human hybrid embryo in hopes of producing human organs one day for the medical purpose.

In the medical world, a chimaera is an organism which contains a mixture of genetically different tissues. It is formed by processes such as fusion of early embryos, grafting or mutation.

The sheep-human hybrid chimaera

The scientists have created the sheep-human hybrid by introducing human stem cells into the sheep embryos. The chimaera thus formed was more than 99 per cent sheep and a little bit human. Although, the human portion of the organism thus formed was extremely small, the fact that it existed is sure to bring about fresh debates in the field of research. By cell count, only about one in 10,000 cells in the sheep embryos were human.

"The contribution of human cells so far is very small. It's nothing like a pig with a human face or human brain," stem cell biologist Hiro Nakauchi from Stanford University

The ultimate motto of the research

The aim of creating an animal-human hybrid is to make such an arrangement where human organs can be produced for donation purpose. Scientists are working towards the possibility of growing human body parts inside unnatural, engineered animals.

Even today the best-matched organs, except if they come from identical twins, don't last very long because with time the immune system continuously is attacking them

- reproductive biologist Pablo Ross from the University of California, Davis

In the past, scientists have made gene modified pig lungs to filter human blood in the lab of Dr Lars Burdorf at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

The road to organ harvesting

Producing human organs inside engineered animals is still a long way off. But the high need of organs for transplantation drives the researchers to make it happen. To make the transplant work, the scientists consider the presence of at least 1 per cent of the embryo's cell to be human so this sheep-human hybrid embryo is still a preliminary result. But increasing the human ratio in the chimaera carries other ethical questions like:

• What kind of an organism will it be?

• What if the human cells go to the brain of the animal?

"All of these approaches are controversial, and none of them are perfect, but they offer hope to people who are dying on a daily basis," Ross says. "We need to explore all possible alternatives to provide organs to ailing people."

The findings of the sheep-human hybrid chimaera were presented at the annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, Texas.

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