 Hello everyone, this is Mary from Understanding Animal Research and today we are going to be highlighting the most important animal research news stories from January 2022. The biggest animal research news story from January is of course the world's first ever picked a human heart transplant. On Monday the 7th of January, David Bennett, a 57 year old man from the United States, was successfully transplanted with the heart from a genetically altered pig. This might sound like science fiction, but the research leading up to this breakthrough has taken decades. Thanks to advances in gene editing technology, researchers have overcome organ rejection to successfully transplant organs from genetically altered pigs into monkeys. Last year, kidneys from genetically altered pigs were successfully transplanted into two brain dead people and the kidneys functioned like normal. Mr. Bennett's recent heart surgery really is the first of its kind. Pig organs are good candidates for xenotransplantation, which is a transplant between an animal and a human. The reason pigs are such good candidates is because their organs are anatomically similar to human organs. To help the human body accept the pig heart, six genes were inserted into the genome of the donor pig and a further four genes were deactivated from the pig's genome to prevent organ rejection in the patient and to ensure that the pig heart remains human sized. Currently, in the UK, there are over 300 people waiting for a heart transplant, but unfortunately there just is not enough donor hearts available, which is why research such as this has the potential to save many lives. Next on the list is some of the latest COVID-19 research. Recent studies using mice and hamsters show that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is more likely to infect the throat than the lungs. This is in contrast to previous variants such as Delta that caused more infection in the lungs because the virus replicates more in the throat than it does deeper in the lungs. This might explain why Omicron is less deadly but more transmittable. Animals that have been infected with Omicron have shown less severe disease than those infected with other COVID-19 variants. They lose less weight and they experience less severe forms of pneumonia. Mice and hamsters are some of the most used animals for COVID-19 research. Mice have been used to test vaccine safety and efficacy, while hamsters are used to answer basic research questions because they react to the virus in a similar way to humans. This month has also seen new research using mRNA technology to repair heart damage in mice. Messenger RNA, mRNA for short, was used to temporarily reprogram immune cells to target the collagen seen in tissue scarring, such as after a heart attack. This technique significantly reduced scarring in mice with damaged heart tissue, opening the possibility of applying the technique to people. Our last research story from January is another one involving mice. In this study, mice with cystic fibrosis underwent a bone marrow transplant which encouraged the production of healthy monocytes. Because of the bone marrow transplant, the mice lived for longer and experienced less information compared to mice with cystic fibrosis that had not been given a transplant. Treatment options are limited for people with cystic fibrosis and while a lot more research is needed on this technique, it could lead to a treatment that gives patients long lasting relief from cystic fibrosis symptoms. That's it from us this month. If you would like to learn more about animal research and the story is mentioned in this video, you can find all the info on our website. Thank you for watching and don't forget to subscribe to our channel for more animal research videos.