“Genes Inserted to Address Rejection and Thrombosis” … Could This Open the Way for Pig Organ Transplants?

A new transgenic pig cell line that could simultaneously address immune rejection and thrombosis, problems that occur when pig organs are transplanted into humans, has been developed by South Korean researchers.

The Rural Development Administration said on the 3rd that the National Institute of Animal Science had established a cell line for producing transgenic pigs to reduce immune rejection and thrombotic and inflammatory responses that occur when pig organs are transplanted into humans, and had completed domestic and Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) patent applications.

Pig organs have attracted attention for transplantation because their size and function are similar to those of human organs, but the human immune system recognizes them as foreign substances and attacks them. This causes severe immune rejection, thrombosis and inflammation, making it difficult to maintain the function of the transplanted organ.

The newly developed cell line eliminates the function of the pig gene “B4GALNT2,” which triggers immune rejection, and precisely inserts two human-derived immune-regulating genes (CD39 and CD73) that regulate thrombosis and inflammatory responses in its place.

Using flow cytometry, the researchers confirmed that CD39 protein was expressed in 94.8% of cells and CD73 protein in 99.0% of cells. Expression levels were also up to 25-fold and 73-fold higher, respectively, than in the control group. Functional analysis showed that extracellular adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which promotes inflammation, rapidly decreased, while adenosine, which alleviates inflammation, increased by up to 26-fold, demonstrating that the inserted genes performed their intended functions.

To secure rights to the technology, the researchers filed a domestic patent application (application No. 10-2025-0081722) in June last year and completed an international patent application (application No. PCT/KR2026/097170) in May this year. They plan to use the cell line to produce transgenic cloned pigs, verify its function at the individual-animal level and apply it to follow-up transplantation research.

“This study demonstrated that the introduced genes were stably expressed and actually functioned to regulate inflammation-related signals,” said Lee Kyung-tae, head of the Animal Bio-Genome Division at the National Institute of Animal Science of the Rural Development Administration. “We will produce transgenic pigs, verify their function at the individual-animal level and advance the work into follow-up xenotransplantation research.”