Gene edited pigs approved by US Food and Drug Administration for consumption in the US.

“These pigs could turn out to be the most financially valuable genetically modified animal ever created—the first CRISPR hit product to reach the food system.“

April 2025 : Gene-Edited Pigs Cleared for U.S. Consumption

In a major milestone for gene editing and agriculture, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved pigs engineered to resist a deadly virus that devastates pig farms: porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS). Using CRISPR technology, the British company Genus successfully edited out the receptor the virus needs to infect pigs—effectively rendering the animals immune.

As MIT Technology Review reports, these are among the first genetically modified animals approved for food in the U.S. Unlike earlier transgenic efforts, such as fast-growing salmon that took decades to clear regulatory hurdles, these pigs were edited without introducing foreign DNA. That shift has helped speed approval of the pigs and also caused the genetically altered salmon company to shut down.

The technical achievement of the pigs mirrors controversial human embryo edits done in China to thwart HIV in 2018 but without the same ethical backlash. In the case of livestock, the economic benefit of rearranging DNA is clearer: PRRS, the respitory disease this animal will never get, costs U.S. producers hundreds of millions annually.

After the approval in the United States of this genetically modified pig, Genus’ (the company that created the pig) stock value jumped up by a couple of hundred million dollars on the London Stock Exchange. It’s worth noting that 34% of all meat consumed on the planet is pig meat.

But there is still a way to go before gene-edited bacon appears on shelves in the US. Before it invests in a big sales pitch to pig farmers, Genus says, it needs to also seek approval in Mexico, Canada, and Japan, which are major export markets for American pork.

Source Material:

UPDATE April 30, 2025 to MIT Technology Review : Gene editing made pigs immune to a deadly epidemic, by Antonio Regaldo December 11, 2020 https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/11/1013176/crispr-pigs-prrs-cd163-genus