Isle(t) of the pigs

Credit: Photo by Gail Simons"> Credit: Photo by Gail Simons In August 1806, an English whaling captain by the name of Abraham Bristow was sailing home to England from the colony of Van Diemen's Land (now the Australian state of Tasmania) when he came across a remote, windswept archipelago of small islands. He named them "Lord Auckland's," in honor of his father's friend William Eden, First Baron Auckland. These seven sub-Antarctic specks - Auckland Island is the largest, at 42 km long - are more than 300 km south of New Zealand and as inhospitable as you like. "It's a wonderful place, but it's very, very harsh," says Mike Willis, a New Zealand wildlife specialist who has visited the islands several times. "They have exceptionally volatile weather, with huge storms and snow. It can go from sunny to snowing in an hour." Despite their terrible climate, the islands were visited regularly by sailors in the 1800s because of their proximity to seal and whale hunting grounds. But their treacherous coastlines resulted in plenty of shipwrecks. "It was a major maritime graveyard down there," Willis says. In an effort to provide food for any shipwrecked sailors who made it to shore, Bristow returned to the islands in 1807 and released pigs, which was a common practice in those days. Otherwise, for most of the intervening years, the islands have remained uninhabited, aside from an unsuccessful settlement and a couple of failed farming ventures in the mid-19th century. The islands might not have suited humans, but the pigs seem to have thrived. When the explorer James Clark Ross passed through en route to Antarctica in 1840, he reported numerous pigs, and he released more for good measure. Over the following decades, pigs were released on at least two other occasions, so that by the end of the 1800s, a thriving pig population inhabited the islands. Since then, the Auckland Island pigs have been genetically isolated, surviving in the bitter conditions of the islands. When Willis first led an expedition from the Rare Breeds Conservation Society of New Zealand to trap some of the pigs for conservation reasons in 1999, he found that they had reverted to the wild form, with small bodies, long narrow heads and snouts, and straight tails. "Pigs revert very, very quickly to the wild form," he explains, "and the most striking thing about them was their temperament. They were very quiet and calm after capture." For Robert Elliott, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Auckland, the pigs showed another interesting characteristic: They were completely free of the infections that plague other pig herds. Since the 1980s Elliott had been interested in using transplanted cells to produce insulin in patients with type 1 diabetes, and at the time the pigs were brought off the island, he had already begun trials of pig islet cell xenotransplants. For pig cells to be acceptable for transplant into humans, they must be free of any diseases that could be passed on to patients, Elliott explains. "It's hugely important," he says, so he and his team tested the Auckland Island pigs for diseases at their own labs and sent samples elsewhere for confirmation. "To our delight they just didn't have any of those bacteria, parasites, or viruses," he says. "As far as we know, this is the only herd in the world that meets that requirement ... They're the cleanest herd of pigs in the world." Elliott's company is one of the few worldwide that is experimenting with porcine islet cell transplants as a treatment for human diabetes. The certified pathogen-free Auckland Island herd and their offspring are now bred in an isolated "pig palace," as Elliott calls it, in New Zealand, for precisely this purpose. As for how they came to be disease-free, it's a bit of a mystery, Elliott says. "Perhaps it was a case of survival of the fittest," he says. "Then again, some of these viruses may be of more recent origin." Either way, his company is planning to use the Auckland island pigs as a source of encapsulated pig islet cells in Phase IIa clinical trials beginning soon. "It's fortunate for us [that] those pigs were left there all that time ago," he says.

Isle(t) of the pigs

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