COLUMBIA, MO. — The National Swine Resource and Research Center (NSRRC) at the University of Missouri (MU) announced that it received $8 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to expand its research facility and work on various scientific discoveries.

Construction on the expanded facility is expected to begin in February 2024 and to be completed by summer 2025. MU said the new center would have extremely high biosecurity protocols to ensure the safe transfer of organs from pigs to humans and nonhuman primates.

The department is led by Randall Prather, a distinguished professor in the MU College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources. His research includes translational medicine or therapies and treatments that are successful in pigs that may be successful in treating humans with the same diseases.

“We undertake projects for things that have failed in studies with mice but are much better suited for pigs,” said Prather, a Curators’ distinguished professor in the MU College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources. “For example, you can’t take a mouse’s heart and transplant it into a human, it’s not going to work, but pigs are far more genetically and physiologically similar to a human, so they are very good biomedical models to study diseases that impact humans. The cardiovascular systems are very similar between pigs and humans, and baby pigs are also great for studying infant nutrition, as their nutritional requirements and the way they absorb nutrients is very similar to humans.”

Although the NSRRC focuses mainly on biomedical research, Prather’s research also has agricultural applications. One example is making pigs that are resistant to certain diseases, which has implications for both agriculture and human medicine.

“One example is the only genetically modified pig that has been approved for human consumption, designed for people who suffer from red meat allergy,” Prather said, who’s worked at MU for 33 years. “We discovered that by knocking out, or disrupting, a gene that produces a specific sugar molecule on the surface of cells within pigs, humans with red meat allergy can eat the genetically modified pork, which is offered on a limited basis in a slaughterhouse in Iowa, without suffering from any digestive issues.”

The NSRRC has made more than 90 different genetic modifications in pigs to study different diseases, including spinal muscular atrophy and cystic fibrosis, the most common genetic mutation, affecting Caucasian adolescents in North America.

“It is very intellectually stimulating because every few months, we basically get a mini master’s degree in various fields of physiology, and this grant will help us continue this important work,” Prather said. “At heart, I’m a pig reproductive physiologist and I understand early embryo development, and with that basic understanding, we can now make genetic modifications to investigate and address all kinds of diseases.”

The center said it received funding from the NIH for 20 years.