Wuzhishan pig

The Inbred Wuzhishan Pig (“WZSP”) was the result of almost thirty-year of endeavor led by Professor Feng Shutang, formerly Research Fellow at the Beijing Institute of Animal Science, Chinas Academy of Agricultural Sciences.^[1] It is a new type of miniature pig, a new medical and life science experimental model animal.

On November 19, 2016, Beijing Grand Life Science & Technology Co., Ltd. successfully produced a litter of eight inbred piglets of F25 (the 25th generation), with an inbreeding coefficient of 0.995. The litter of four male and four female piglets demonstrated the stable capability of inbred WZSP fertility, another scientific milestone of inbred large animal reproduction in the history.

WZSP inbred identification was successfully conducted in early 2013 by the Chinese PLA General Hospital (Hospital No. 301) via in-kind and x-transplant of skins, and its full sequencing and analysis of genome was completed by BGI in 2012.^[2] WZSP became China's first inbred large model animal with full independent intellectual property rights by the developers, and the naming ceremony will declare it a new animal species.

Additional research on the future life science and medical applications of WZSP have been launched, and certain results have been published, including injection of embryonic germ cells into blastocysts,^[3] and Islet isolation and purification.^[4]

At the medical research and practice areas, over a dozen of Chinese leading research institutions, medical schools, hospitals and enterprises had conducted or are being conducting researches and experiments in the life science, disease and surgical animal model, drug development and x-transplant areas with Wuzhishan pigs.^[5][6] It is widely believed and reported^[7] that Chinese WZSP will create substantial new opportunities in life science development, as well as medical and drug research. The Intellectual property rights are protected by both Chinese patents^[8] and the patent of the United States of America.^[9]

On May 18, 2015, China Academy of Agricultural Sciences announced that its Institute of Animal Science had entered into an agreement to transfer the entirety of its research achievements and all relevant patents on WZSP to Beijing Grand Life Science & Technology Co., Ltd.,^[10] which will be the exclusive owner to industrialize the Wuzhishan pigs.

On June 23, 2017, the Academy of Military Medical Sciences of China and Grand Life Science jointly announced in "Study on Porcine endogenous retrovirus from Wuzhishan minipig inbred and establishment of a new population without infectious PERV" that the PERV-pol gene-deficient WZSP have been identified and verified by systematic virology methods and whole genome sequencing^[11], and Grand Life has succeed in reproducing F0/F1 PERV-noninfectious WZSP herd that available for advanced biomedical research purposes^[12], including series of studies under the 2017-2020 National Primary Research Programs on Bio-material Development, Tissue-organ Repair and Xenotransplantation that commissioned by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China.

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