Sept. 8, 2026
By Roger Meissen | Division of Research
When Kiho Lee and Kristin Whitworth learned St. Louis physicians had saved a toddler through a rare “domino” heart transplant in August, they took particular pride in knowing their pigs helped make the procedure possible. The surgery allowed doctors to salvage heart valves from the damaged heart taken out of a heart transplant recipient to save the toddler.
“In 2022, we got a call from a heart surgeon at Medical University of South Carolina, curious if a heart valve taken from a damaged heart would grow with a patient,” said Lee, director of the National Swine Resource and Research Center (NSRRC) at Mizzou. “So, he called us up and said, ‘Okay, we need your pigs,’ and using our model, he measured that the valve actually grows as the pig grows because the part that was transplanted was fluorescent.”
This sort of outcome is what NSRRC scientists love to see: medical applications aided by their pigs.
Mizzou has seen substantial growth in research using swine models this year. The newly completed NSRRC expansion joins new facilities at Mizzou’s South Farm and completion of the second phase of the NextGen Center for Influenza and Emerging Infectious Diseases to bolster our biomedical use of pigs in research.
NSRRC added 12,220 square feet of space, doubling its capacity to around 200 pigs thanks to an $8 million National Institutes of Health grant.
“One of our bottlenecks has been pig pens — we only have a certain number — so anytime we were approached about creating a pig model for a new disease or purpose, we had to decide what project we could end to make room for the next model,” said Whitworth, associate director of the NSRRC. “The more pigs we can provide, the more impactful studies can be done.”
Those studies have created more than 90 genetic modifications since the center opened its doors in 2006. NSRRC pig models help scientists across Mizzou and the U.S. study diseases including cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy, retinitis pigmentosa, cancer and cardiovascular disorders. NSRRC is a specific-pathogen-free facility, so all pigs are born and raised there, and 30 percent of its swine are tested every three months for 13 particular pathogens to guarantee models serve scientists without problems.
On Mizzou’s campus, the center sees significant collaboration with faculty at the NextGen Precision Health building. It provides models for scientists there from cardiovascular and oncology to Alzheimer’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“We’re working with Jae Wook Jeong at NextGen on endometriosis research, and he’s part of our grand portfolio of swine on campus. He came as a MizzouForward hire, invested his own resources to buy equipment and we trained on it together with some of the clinicians on campus,” Lee said. “Now we're using it to induce endometriosis in pig models by surgically transplanting endometrium from the uterus and into the body cavity where the models start to form lesions mimicking endometriosis, and we monitor them just like what clinicians would do in our hospital.”
Endometriosis — where tissue similar to the uterine lining grows outside the uterus — affects one in 10 women of reproductive age worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. This out-of-place tissue can cause serious pelvic pain, excessive menstrual bleeding between periods, and subsequent cysts and scar tissue. It often leads to infertility issues.
Growth at Mizzou’s South Farm promises to complement other pig research expansion. The first South Farm swine building opened in 2023, and the newest addition increases capacity by 70 percent thanks to UM System funding approved by the Board of Curators’.
“We call those buildings Big PHiG — Precision Health in Pigs — and the expansion came at the perfect time because we need more animals to complete many new swine studies launching on campus,” Lee said. “That facility houses agriculture models and has a surgical suite and other rooms for procedures.”
Those new projects include large NIH grants from Mizzou’s Henry Wan, who directs the NextGen Influenza and Emerging Infectious Disease, to understand immune response mechanisms to influenza infection and newly-awarded NIH grants for researchers like Bhanu Telugu, an associate professor of animal science in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, to develop better models to study heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other chronic illnesses in ways that more closely mimic human biology. In addition, the National Swine Testing Center on campus also uses the facility for its models and procedures.
For Whitworth, who has been at NSRRC since before it opened, this new era means excitement over the inquiries that come into for new projects.
“It's never boring because I never know what’s going to come across my inbox every morning,” Whitworth said. “We've been doing this a long time, we've made a lot of models, and it’s exciting that it seems like in the past five years is when this is transitioned into the clinical applications where they're actually used. Now that we’re seeing those results, that’s been the most fun.”
Built in 2006 thanks to National Institutes of Health funding, NSRRC ships pig models across the country for medical research. It ensures biomedical researchers have critically needed pig models of human health and disease. Because pigs share many anatomical and physiological characteristics with humans, they are valuable models for studying diseases, testing therapies, developing medical devices, and advancing transplantation research. Find more about the center at nsrrc.missouri.edu.