PERV Receptors Identified

Researchers have identified the receptors that are used by porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERV) in order to enter and infect a cell, a critical discovery that may aid the use of xenotransplantation using pig organs. Their finding was reported in the May 27, 2003, issue of the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

PERV has been considered to be a key safety issue in transplantation using pig organs because the virus has been shown to infect some human cells in laboratory tissues. All pigs are born with PERV, which poses no harm to the pig itself. Unlike other viruses, which can be eliminated through breeding or raising pigs in a clean lab environment, multiple copies of PERV form part of the normal genomic DNA of pigs and are passed from one generation to the next.

"There is an unmet need in clinical transplantation for donors, and the availability of acceptable porcine organs could solve this huge demand,” said Professor Dan Solomon from The Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, CA, USA). "It remains important to identify the risk of a potential infectious agent to both the patient receiving a transplant as well as others. Our identification of the PERV receptors will allow us to begin to address this issue.”

The study was performed in a collaborative effort among Immerge BioTherapeutics (Charlestown, MA, USA) and researchers at University College London (UK) and The Scripps Institute.




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