HoldsUp

George Church

Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology

George Church, PhD, is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and of health sciences and technology at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work centers on genetics, gene editing technology, and synthetic biology, and he contributed to the Human Genome Project. His published research spans topics including genome editing design, DNA synthesis, spatial transcriptomics, synthetic cellular circuits, genetic recoding, and adult genomic sequencing.

53 claims checked on air: 3 context 3 overstated 38 supported 9 unverified

What they said on air - citing their own research

2 citing their own research

0:46:35supportedvery lowtheir own paperGeorge Church, PhD: Rewriting Genomes to Eradicate Disease a

Non-human primates receiving germline gene-edited pig organ transplants have achieved survival times of approximately 500 to 600 days.

"synthetic biology that we do on the germline of pigs, which now made it into many preclinical primate transplant trials—pig to primate—and a few pig to human trials that are going on. Primate survival looks like around 600 days so far, and there's still a couple that are still alive at 500, 600 days." (said at 0:46:35)

Preclinical xenotransplantation studies using organs from genetically engineered porcine donors transplanted into non-human primates have demonstrated graft survival durations reaching and exceeding 500 to 600 days. For instance, baboons receiving cardiac xenografts from genetically modified pigs (with alpha 1-3 galactosyltransferase gene knockout and human transgenes) achieved graft survival up to 945 days with established prior benchmarks of 500 days. Similarly, kidney grafts from donor pigs carrying 69 genomic edits have supported long-term graft survival in cynomolgus monkeys. Because the supporting evidence comes exclusively from animal models, certainty is graded as very low.

0:50:45supportedvery lowtheir own paperGeorge Church, PhD: Rewriting Genomes to Eradicate Disease a

George Church and Luhan Yang's group published research demonstrating the use of CRISPR to target and eliminate African swine fever virus DNA.

"Anyway, as a side project, we published a paper on getting rid of African swine fever virus by making CRISPR to attack the viral DNA." (said at 0:50:45)

A 2024 study co-authored by Luhan Yang and George Church's team evaluated a multiplexed CRISPR-Cas9 system targeting nine loci across the African swine fever virus (ASFV) genome. The researchers demonstrated that targeting the viral DNA substantially suppressed ASFV replication in vitro and developed germline-edited pigs expressing the system, which delayed infection onset in some cases (though it did not ultimately confer complete survival upon challenge).

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