Hens Lay Cancer Fighting Eggs
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Dr. Helen M. Sang, from the Roslin Institute (the same institute which brought you Dolly the sheep, the world’s first cloned mammal 10 years ago) in Midlothian, UK, and her associates have succeeded in producing multiple generations of genetically altered, or transgenic, hens that produce drugs with the potential to fight cancer.
“But it is still early days yet,” said Sang. “We’ve made significant steps in developing a process that we hope will be an alternative production platform for protein drugs.”
Sang hopes that using transgenic chickens to produce therapeutic proteins will “bring down the costs of drugs that currently are prohibitively expensive.”
Sang is working in collaboration with gene therapy company Oxford BioMedica and bio-tech company Viragen.
They even have a term of this: “Pharming”. Pharming is the production of human pharmaceuticals in farm animals.
What are transgenic animals?
Wikipedia says:
Transgenic animals are animals produced with externally introduced genes. Transgenic animals can be used in many fields and as models to test the effect of certain genes on health. They can be used to produce “enhanced” versions of an animal.
They can also be used as bioreactors: animals that produce an extra substance we want. Imagine having a transgenic cow that is modified to produce insulin in large quantities in its milk. This insulin can then be purified from the cows milk and used in replacement therapy for treating patients with diabetes mellitus.
An example are transgenic flies, which are flies produced with externally introduced genes. Transgenic flies can be used in many fields and as models to test the effect of certain genes on health and development, similar to the usage of transgenic animals. As the fly genome is in general simpler than that of vertebrates, the effect of introducing an external gene is usually more pronounced than in vertebrates.
Legal and ethical issues apart, this seems to be a rapidly growing method of producing drugs.
Technorati Tags: Roslin, Sang, Dolly, transgenic hens, chickens, Oxford BioMedica, Viragen, therapeutic proteins
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