In Britain, gene-edited chickens have been created which makes them resistant to the H9N2-UDL strain of bird flu. Bird flu has decimated poultry and wild birds in recent years in the UK. Also, bird flu is a zoonosis and can be transferred from birds to people. This research benefits birds and secondarily it might benefit people.
The researchers say that the gene-edited chickens are not entirely immune to the virus but by altering one gene they found that they are less likely to contract the disease.
I understand that they going to do further work on the technique as it might work against the H5N1 strain which is the one that most people know about. This has killed tens of thousands of wild birds in Britain. Millions have died around the world and the virus has severely disrupted poultry farms.
The chickens were created by a team of researchers from the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London and the Pirbright Institute in Surrey. They monitored the chickens as a secure facility for two years. They laid eggs in the normal way and appeared to be healthy.
Currently, in the UK, gene-edited animals cannot be created to produce food for humans. However, The Times newspaper (the source of this information) tells me that under the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act, which came into force in March, it is legal to farm gene-edited animals.
The research team was led by Prof Mike McGrew from the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh. He said: “Highly pathogenic bird flu is widespread in Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, and has now even spread into South America and is feared to be moving into Antarctica. This is causing unprecedented deaths of wild birds and devastating impacts on farm poultry.”
He added that, “Gene-editing offers a promising route towards permanent disease resistance, which could be passed down through generations, protecting poultry and reducing the risks to humans and wild birds.”
He believes that vaccinating poultry is more expensive than gene editing poultry. He stressed that more work needs to be done before these chickens could be farmed commercially.
They’re concerned that the gene-edited chickens may force the virus to mutate to get around the obstacle and that the mutated virus may be more dangerous to humans than the current one.
They believe that they might be able to get around this problem by “editing to extra genes”.
My thanks to The Times newspaper for this information. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.
