From May 20, Pioneer Ecoscience Co., Ltd., which has been selling genome-edited tomato seedlings and tomatoes since last year, began selling the first genome-edited processed food, tomato puree. The puree is on sale for 5,832 yen for 30 sachets of 15 grams of puree each.

Recently, xenotransplantation, in which pig organs are transplanted to humans, has become active, and the center of this activity is kidney transplantation. Last year, a series of pig kidney transplants were performed at New York University Langone Medical Center and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In both of these cases, kidneys from genetically modified pigs were transplanted to brain-dead patients. The kidneys were produced by Revivicor Inc., which provided pig hearts for heart transplants to the University of Maryland. It has now been revealed that there is a new plan to transplant a pig kidney into an actual living patient. The transplant is to be carried out by a team under Dr. Tatsuro Kawai of Massachusetts General Hospital. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently reviewing the application, and if approved, the transplant will take place next year. The pig kidney for transplantation was developed by a bio-venture company, eGenesis. (Tokyo Shimbun 2022/5/17 and others)