Lord Winston's fury as red tape drives British GM pig transplant experiments to the U.S.

A furious Robert Winston has condemned the red tape that has killed off pioneering British experiments that could solve the shortage of transplant organs.

The TV presenter and fertility expert has been forced to transfer life-saving research using 'designer pigs' to America, where regulations are less strict.

The move has robbed Britain of a potential breakthrough that could also have earned it millions of pounds.

Lord Winston said: 'Our U.S. friends will benefit from our technology and yet another British innovation will be jeopardized.

'The income we might have generated for Britain will be lost.'

Lord Winston, best known as the presenter of TV programmes such as Child Of Our Time, will start breeding the first genetically modified pigs for transplant in California in three months' time.

The experiments aim to create GM animals with organs that will not be rejected when transplanted into humans.

Although the use of pigs is controversial, the Imperial College London professor believes they could solve the desperate shortage of organs for transplant within 15 years.

More than 9,000 Britons are waiting for a transplant. Around 100 need a new heart, 300 are desperate for a liver while 6,500 need kidneys.

Pig organs are the perfect size for transplant and work in a similar way to the human variety.

Breeding programme: Pig organs are the perfect size for human transplants

However, before pig organs can be used in people, their genetic make-up must be altered so that they are not rejected.

Lord Winston's team has been working on GM pigs in London for years. They have already created pigs with genetically modified sperm.

However, under Government and EU rules the scientists have been banned from mating the pigs - the crucial next stage of their work.

Lord Winston said: 'When one of the animals escaped on Home Office premises and mated by accident, the sow was killed under instructions from Defra (the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs).

'And we were not allowed to do a post-mortem on the piglets to find out whether or not the piglets were transgenic.

'That is a shocking waste of research resources.'

He said the pigs used in the experiments were proven to have no viruses - and that the research did not put human health in danger.

Lord Winston added: 'Years of work and investment have been mostly wasted. And we have had to say a sad goodbye to our committed scientific team.'

Even before the EU ban, it took the team two years to get a Home Office licence to experiment on six pigs.

The red tape, and a shortage of funding, means the work is now taking place at the California Institute of Technology.

The work involves tricking the body's immune system into believing that pig organs are human.

Lord Winston's team has developed a way of giving pigs genes which alter key molecules on the surface of hearts, kidneys and livers - disguising their animal origin  - without changing the way the organs behave.

The gene product is injected into the testes of a piglet under a local anaesthetic. Once the pig has grown up, any sperm it produces will carry the human genes.

By mating the pig with ordinary sows, scientists can produce 'humanised' pigs whose organs could be used safely for transplant once they were one year old.

Patients would still need to take drugs to prevent rejection, but the organs should survive the operation.

Lord Winston, who will speak at the British Association science festival in Liverpool today, believes that organs grown in pigs could be used in humans within a decade.

Although the work may meet with some public revulsion, he believes it is more ethical to use a pig to save a life than for 'relatively unnecessary meat eating'.