Pigs help fight neural diseases

A team of Chinese scientists has successfully used a gene editing technique to slice in a segment of a human gene that causes Huntington's disease into a pig.

They were then able to generate offspring carrying this same genetic aberration, which encodes a toxic protein that causes brain cells to die.

The possibility of using pigs to study the degenerative disease has great significance in studying and curing Huntington's, as well as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, said corresponding author Li Xiaojiang, a professor at Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Institute of CNS Regeneration, Guangzhou-based Ji'nan University.