Scientists make gene-edited chickens in bid to halt next pandemic
The greatest fear is that a deadly strain could jump from wild birds via poultry to humans, then mutate into an airborne pandemic
London — British scientists are developing gene-edited chickens designed to be totally resistant to flu in a new approach to trying to stop the next deadly human pandemic. The first of the transgenic chicks will be hatched later this year at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, said Wendy Barclay, a professor of virology at Imperial College London who is co-leading the project. The birds’ DNA has been altered using gene-editing technology known as CRISPR [clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats]. In this case, the “edits” are to remove parts of a protein on which the flu virus normally depends, making the chickens totally flu-resistant. The idea is to generate poultry that cannot get flu and would form a “buffer between wild birds and humans”, Barclay said. Global health and infectious disease specialists cite the threat of a human flu pandemic as one of their biggest concerns. The death toll in the last flu pandemic in 2009-2010 — cause...
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