Seven Little Piggies Make History

Pigs are offering new possibilities for studying Alzheimer’s disease

By SciIll Staff Posted 12.09.2008 at 5:37 pm 2 Comments

This Little Piggie: The piglets rest after their delivery. Henning Bagger/ ScanPix

In the search for disease treatments, the next best thing to human guinea pigs is, well, actual pigs. Believe it or not, their skin and cardiovascular, digestive, urinary and central nervous systems are all very similar to ours. That’s why, in recent decades, scientists have established swine models for osteoporosis, heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease and urinary-tract disorders. Mini-pigs, in particular, which weigh about 70 pounds, are easy to examine using hospital scanners and can undergo the same surgical procedures as we do. In fact, most medical students practice on anesthetized pigs before moving on to people. Pigs are also good subjects for behavioral studies such as those necessary for research on Alzheimer’s disease, the fatal form of dementia that affects an estimated 4.5 million Americans over the age of 65. It’s the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. and costs the nation $100 billion annually.

Last year, a multidisciplinary team of scientists from two Danish institutions, Aarhus University and the University of Copenhagen, began using pigs to study Alzheimer’s. But not just any pigs. The researchers created transgenic pigs—animals whose genomes contain genes from another species. In this case, human genes.

The team introduced the human gene for the heritable form of Alzheimer’s into porcine fibroblasts, the skin cells most often used for cloning because they multiply quickly. The researchers chose the heritable form of the disease, which develops early in life, because it can be detected genetically, rather than the more common, nonheritable form of Alzheimer’s, which manifests later in life and has not been linked to a specific gene. They then used a unique cloning technique to make seven genetically identical pigs with the Alzheimer’s gene.

According to Arne Lund Jørgensen, who is leading the study at Aarhus, pigs could suffer from Alzheimer’s as humans do. “A porcine model shows that the pig brain has the metabolic pathway to produce Alzheimer’s-like pathology,” he says. This could offer an improved understanding of the mechanisms involved in the disease and bring scientists closer to better treatments or even the ever-elusive cure.

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2 Comments

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Chipper Smoltz

12/10/08 at 2:23 am

Maybe this is one of those areas or diseases where nano-technology could help... maybe tackling it with the idea of treatment when the disease is already in the latter stages then attempting to cure it is not the way to treat it... maybe if early symptoms have been detected (the disease is still at its infancy or beginning to occur, then maybe something could be done to prevent it from rapidly progressing or totally halting it).

Since these "plaques" tend to form clumps in the brain, maybe some sort of scanner could be used and mandated for people at a certain age (for Alzheimers due to old age) or from childhood (for those types that are not brought about by old age). It's a protein right? Am thinking of some way of halting the protein build up that causes the clumps by some chemical that would leave the other types of protein untouched but would remove the clumps. Maybe the answer is just so simple that we fail to discover because we need a certain "paradigm shift" on things. Just like the movie Lorenzo's Oil which was based on real life, I believe, maybe the cure or solution would be something like that, something so simple.

It's like there's an article before here in Popular Science wherein they featured nano-technology delivered medicine that's supposed to eliminate cancer cells but leaves good cells unharmed. I dunno much about biological stuff, but I hope that this would help.

In addition, if there would be resveratrol pills in the near future, then maybe this cou

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Chipper Smoltz

12/10/08 at 2:26 am

(Sorry my comment got messed up...)

In addition, if there would be resveratrol pills in the near future, then maybe this could help as well for those cases wherein the Alzheimer's is brought about by old age.

You can do it guys....so many beautiful minds wasted by this disease. Good luck guys, and please keep us posted on this.

Btw, I search for some health news at www.worldhealth.net

Unfortunately they don't have a place for comments... some of the stuff I don't understand, but they have articles on radical treatments (that works) for certain types of diseases as well as prevention, diet, supplements, etc.

Thanks Popular Science for allowing me to share the website. Please visit it guys and gals if you have some time.