Dive Brief:
- Smithfield Foods has started a separate bioscience unit to expand its role in supplying pig parts for medical use, according to Reuters.
- The world’s largest pork producer eventually hopes to sell pig organs for transplantation into humans.
- The U.S. market for pork byproducts utilized for medical, pet food and non-food purposes currently stands at more than $100 billion. "We want to signal to the medical device and science communities that this is an area we're focused on — that we're not strictly packers," Courtney Stanton, VP of Smithfield's new bioscience unit, told Reuters.
Dive Insight:
While it might sound like something out of a futuristic horror film, Smithfield believes that pig organs will someday be routinely used for human transplantation.
The science behind the thinking has been making its way around research labs for years, and numerous successful pig-to-primate transplants have been conducted. Many doctors admit that the similarities between pig and human organs make the idea feasible.
Still, there are obstacles. Past pig-to-human transplants have failed because of genetic differences that led to organ rejection and pig viruses that threatened to infect the patient. CRISPR could be a viable way to edit out potentially harmful virus genes from pig organs in the future, however. One scientist predicts that this technology could lead to the first transplant using "humanized" pig organs in a clinical trial this year.
Smithfield already has established relationships with healthcare companies including Abbott Laboratories, Medtronic and United Therapeutics Corp, and harvests materials for medical use from the 16 million hogs it slaughters each year.
The company stated that the U.S. market for pork byproducts used for medical, pet food and non-food purposes stands at more than $100 billion — excluding any potential market for animal-to-human transplants, known as xenotransplants. With numbers like that, it will be interesting to see if other major meat producers create bioscience segments for their own companies.