YEREVAN, OCTOBER 8, ARMENPRESS. For years, scientists have been trying to manipulate pig organs so that they could be transplanted into the 8,000 humans waiting for a life saving transplant. So far, that hasn’t worked. But George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of the biotech company eGenesis, hopes to change that; earlier this week he announced that he and his colleagues had used the gene editing tool CRISPR to modify an unprecedented number of genes in pig embryos in order to make them easier to transplant into humans. “Armenpress” reports about the aforementioned, citing George Church’s report.

Church and his colleagues are combating two of the biggest reasons why pig organ transplants did not work in humans. First, transplants from pigs are more likely to infect the human recipient with nasty viruses which are incorporated in its genetic code. So the researchers have modified 62 of those genes in pig embryos—that’s more than ten times the number of genes that have ever been edited in any other animal.

But there are still some questions about how all the genetic modifications will interact when they’re all done in one animal. So while work like Church’s makes these possibilities more likely, increasing the number of organs available for transplant would certainly be a substantial advance in itself.