Seoul pushes animal organ research for transplant sale

January 13, 2005

The government said yesterday that it would invest 10 billion won to promote medical biotechnology this year in an effort to commercialize animal organs for human transplants and other bio-engineered products by 2009.

In a separate anouncement, the government also said a research team led by Seoul National University professor Hwang Woo-seok has been officially registered as a state institute and its stem cell research approved.

In February 2004, Hwang's cutting edge research produced the first cloned human embryos to generate stem cells for therapeutic purposes.

New legislation that took effect Jan. 1 requires bio-technology institutes to register with the government.

The government has banned the cloning of humans and prohibited stem cell research for commercial purposes.

On bio-technology funding, the Ministry of Science and Technology designated four fields -- xeno-transplantation, or the use of animal organs in humans, immunology, protein-chip technology and drug delivery research -- as the next industrial growth engines for the country's biotech sector.

"The government in the past years has been supporting the efforts by scientists and health industry to enhance research and patent their biotech discoveries in commercializing them," said a ministry spokesman.

"We will concentrate our financial and administrative support on the four biotech growth fields and seek ways to make the technological advancements more accessible to the general public."

In the 10 billion won ($9.5 million) budget, around 2.5 billion won will be for xeno-transplantation research and 2.8 billion won will be invested in immunology. Protein-chip technology, or the method of creating protein micro-arrays to measure the functions of thousands of proteins simultaneously, will receive 2.5 billion won in investments, with the remaining 2.2 billion won going to drug delivery research.

Research in xeno-transplantation has made major advances in recent years with the use of genetic techniques that can alter animal organs so they are not rejected by the human immune system. Industry watchers believe the commercial potential to be immense.

The commercial potential is estimated to be in the billions of dollars.

Well over 100,000 people around the world are on organ transplant waiting lists annually to save their lives, according to medical organizations. The shortage is acute because of the lack of people who register for after-death organ donation.

Scientists consider pigs as the ideal donor animal because their organs are about the same size as humans and they breed quickly, producing large litters.

By Kim Tong-hyung (thkim@heraldm.com).

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This article posted February 11, 2005.