Macdonald home to Canada’s first cloned pigs

BY ELYSE AMEND

elyse.amend@transcontinental.ca

McGill University’s Department of Animal Science, located at the Macdonald Campus in Ste. Anne de Bellevue, is home to Canada’s first-ever cloned piglets – 10 of them to be precise.

“They are all clones, even if they’re from three different mothers. The cells used to produce them are all form one animal,” said Dr. Vilceu Bordignon, the director of McGill’s large animal research unit.

According to Bordignon, research into cloning the pigs started about four years ago. “The cloning process requires many steps,” he said, explaining that the three litters of 17 piglets were produced with cells of one single male pig. The cells were injected into mature female germ cells which had their nuclei removed. After incubating the resulting embryos for some time, they were inserted into the uteruses of four female pigs, three of which became pregnant. Seven of the 17 male piglets underwent autopsies after they were born to investigate any potential health issues. According to Bordignon, the remaining 10 are now several weeks old are developing just fine.

“There is a significant difference in the size of them, which is normal for most species, even if they are clones,” Bordignon said. “They’re growing normally as the pigs we have in the barn.”

The method used to clone the pigs is similar to the approach used for Dolly the sheep in 1996. Pigs were first successfully cloned in 2000 in the United States.

This development could lead to advances in research into human diseases. Bordignon said the next step in the process is to manipulate the cells in the cloned animals. For example, the animals could be cloned to have cardiovascular problems so human medications for cardiovascular disease could be tested on them.

“Pigs are really a good model for understanding the human being. The anatomy, the physiology of the pig – some of the systems are very similar to humans,” Bordignon said, adding another benefit is that pigs live longer than mice, which are also used for research. “Instead of just cloning them, we can clone them with a specific genotype. This is the next step in the research we’re doing now.”

Bordignon said all animal research at McGill University must have the approval of two committees before going ahead.

“We have committees to analyze and judge if we’re allowed to do the research we’re doing on animals or not,” he said, adding the rules are based on the Canadian Council of Animal Use. “Then we have to go to the ethics committee. There is nothing we do in research that is not approved by those two committees.”

The research was funded with about $1 million in grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), Le Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies (FQRNT) and McGill University.