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Kinda well-known CRISPR company eGenesis is testing pig organs in unspecified primates at Mass General. Story by Karen Weintraub 1/ (thread) technologyreview.com/s/613666/crisp…
2/ Company is a xenotransplant spinout of George Church lab. I was real surprised when Church started saying, in 2017, there would be human tests of these organs "within a year". See that here.
3/ Its unclear why he said this. There may be some information we don't know? Not sure. Common sense tells you that before you goto man, you have to test lots of pig organs in monkeys. Said as much then.
4/ So in fact the monkey tests are happening now, Karen confirmed. They're ongoing at Mass General Hospital in the hands of transplant chief James Markmann. Here's a brief comment that appeared in a hospital circular. massgeneral.org/surgery/assets… 
4/ Its real vague. Doesn't mention species (baboons?) or the organ involved (liver?). For now, all that is secret.
5/ A different company, Revivicor, is further advanced. It's organs have been tested many times by many hospitals. They have been beating records, with organs surviving a year or more. Revivicor also employs CRISPR gene editing now technologyreview.com/s/540076/surge…
6/ We first learned of eGenesis in 2014. Its a spinout of the George Church lab at harvard, co-founded by star pupil Luhan Yang, a recruit from China. They set out to engineer farm animals with CRISPR
7/ egenesis got a lot of notoriety when they used CRISPR to zap all 62 copies of a virus that hands out inside the pig genome. technologyreview.com/s/613666/crisp…
8/ but what you really need is to remove a bunch of molecules from the surface of pig cells that trigger immune attacks, as well as install some human genes. List of neccessary changes is about 10, good job for CRISPR. Folks still looking for the magic combo so organs survive
9/ Our 1st interaction with Luhan Yang and eGenesis in 2014 was notable. We figured if you could engineer a pig with CRISPR, you could also engineer a human, ie CRISPR baby. Yang confirmed it was so, leading to our story "Engineering the Perfect Baby" technologyreview.com/s/535661/engin…
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