I-8: A Preliminary Report on Production of Organ Deficient Goats at Royan Institute of Biotechnology

Shortage of transplantable organs available for people with endstage diseases has become goal of scientific project worldwide to find new approaches for providing the needed organs. These projects have mainly focused on complementation of pig embryo genetically manipulated or designed to produce an organ deficient embryo. Considering the fact that pig is not the common domestic animal in Middle East, therefore, we have lunch a project to produce pancreatic deficient goat embryos via handmade cloning previously stablished in Royan Institute. In this project we have design a construct with optimization expressing Hes1 gene under control of Pdx-1 promoter in caprine fibroblast cells. It is known, overexpression of Hes1 halts pancreiogenesis. Then selected transfected cells will be used for handmade cloning technique and reconstructed embryos will be transferred to recipient goat in hope of producing an apancreatic embryo. Following, confirmation of this procedure in the next step we will complement the reconstructed blastocyst with human derived stem cells, in hope of producing a goat with “humanized pancrease”. We and other researchers believe this procedure may lead to production of “humanized organ”. Considering, our pervious experience in producing transgenic goat and production of fibroblast lines containing the aforementioned construct, we hope in near future to produce apancreatic goat embryos.