THE PIG AS A BIOMEDICAL MODEL: HOW THE NATIONAL SWINE RESOURCE AND RESEARCH CENTER CAN HELP YOU

Abstract

Swine are an excellent large animal model for human health and disease because their size and physiology are similar to humans, and the progression of many diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, is similar to humans. Due to these similarities, technology, procedures, and novel treatments that have been developed for human diseases can be applied to swine, and vice versa. In addition there are some human diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, that don't recapitulate in the rodent models but are well modeled in swine. Swine have been accepted as the model of choice for several medical applications such as xenotransplantation and surgical training for medical students. Because of the usefulness of swine to better understand human health, the National Institutes of Health has established the National Swine Research and Resource Center to help meet the needs of the biomedical community. While wild type swine and spontaneous mutants have been shown to be valuable, genetically engineered swine provide a new level of utility. With the improvement of the techniques to add genes and make targeted genetic modifications not only have the number of types of genetically engineered pigs increased, but also the number of different diseases modeled have increased. The completion of the swine genome combined with development and improvements of techniques for gene modification will only enhance the continued use and development of swine as models of human health, syndromes and conditions. The resources at the National Swine Resource and Research Center are available to aid investigators with their swine needs for biomedical research. Here will be discussed the importance of swine as a biomedical model, current technologies to produce genetically engineered swine, current biomedical models, and how the completion of the swine genome will promote swine as a biomedical model.