$96M Genetically Engineered Pig Facility Coming to this Texas Town

The City of Houston is gaining a new massive facility dedicated to engineering pig organs for human transplants, and it sure is worth a pretty penny.

Genetically Modified Pig Factory

The biotech company United Therapeutics Corporation has recently set plans to build a facility "that will house two types of genetically modified swine for the purpose of populating commercial facilities," according to the project description from the Texas Department of Licensing and Registration.

This new 77,448 square-foot facility has a whopping price tag of $96 million and will be erected in Harris County in Houston.

The proposed start date of this facility is Feb. 28, 2025, and will reportedly be complete at the end of August in 2026.

The pigs that will be housed and tended to at this facility will have modified DNA strands and their conditions must comply with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. They will also be fed an exclusively vegetarian diet.

What is United Therapeutics Corporation?

The company's website calls themselves "bold and unconventional" in their approach to medical research in rare diseases and transplantable organs. The founder and CEO, Martine Rothblatt, created the company in 1996 in efforts to discover a cure for his daughter's life-threatening disease.

2022 saw the company's first successful transplant of a pig's heart into a human, and it was around this time that they received a transplanted lung via drone delivery for the very first time.

United Therapeutics Corporation is listed on the NASDAQ (as UTHR) and pulls a revenue of about $2 billion.