“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

That’s George Orwell in Animal Farm, making a political, allegorical, point. But he also could have been talking about biology.

Humans and pigs share a lot of similarities when it comes to anatomy and physiology. Pigs’ organ systems are 80-90 percent similar to those of humans, veterinary researcher Dr. Michael Swindle told FOX News in 2014.

“They are what’s known as a translational research model, so if [something] works in the pig, then it has a high possibility of working in a human,” Swindle said.

That’s why the news last year that researchers had eliminated PERVs – which stands for porcine endogenous retroviruses – in some pig kidney cell DNA was so important.

Continue Reading The Importance of Porcine Tissues in Research →