Page 33 - Breeding Edge ebook

The devastating PRRS virus causes disease in two ways: a
respiratory form that weakens young pigs' ability to breathe and
a more severe reproductive form that causes pigs to die during
late pregnancy. In North America alone, PRRS is estimated to
cost producers $600 million annually.

“As a pig farmer, I see that one of the greatest diseases that
impacts every pig farm across the United States is PRRS
(porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome). If there’s
an opportunity for us to eradicate diseases like that – or have
resistance to diseases like that – it would be just
astronomical!”

Indeed, at least two companies say they can deliver just what

Titus says he wants. Both Genus, which owns a patent to its

technique, and Acceligen, a division of Recombinetics, also

involved in developing the trait, report they can infuse pigs with

PRRS resistance. Thomas Titus farms near Elkhart,
Illinois

The Genus procedure, for example, deletes a pig gene that the
virus needs as a doorway to the animal’s cells. But, as with other gene editing (GE) discoveries, those
PRRS remedies can’t happen until the U.S. government approves these new animals.

More broadly, researchers are eager for the U.S. and other governments to decide how to use science
and risk-based criteria to regulate this new approach to genetic engineering. That’s why

commercialization is still a few years out.

For now, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
defines all intentional DNA alterations in animals as
drugs, irrespective of how or why they were changed.

“It’s a nonsensical position,” says Alison Van
Eenennaam, a Cooperative Extension Specialist in
Animal Genomics and Biotechnology at the
University of California-Davis.

“If I didn’t know any better, I would think the
(FDA) regulations were written by Greenpeace
because they are not science-based,” she
emphasized during a recent speech at the
American Farm Bureau Federation. “We can’t run
all of these animals through a drug evaluation.”

But while the regulatory issues are being sorted out, researchers and industry leaders are marching ahead
with these new scientific tools, along with ongoing efforts to use current animal-improving practices like
artificial insemination, embryo transfer and genetic selection.

Van Eenennaam says there’s an “urgent need to ensure the science-based framework focused on these
novel products is adopted. Or else it’s going to block U.S. ranchers from having access to this
technology.”

www.Agri-Pulse.com 31