Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Eggs with drugs

From livescience.com:
"Traditional methods for producing therapeutic proteins such as antibodies used to treat cancer and arthritis are expensive. Farm animals could produce them faster and cheaper, the thinking goes.

Researchers led by Helen Sang of the Roslin BioCentre in Edinburgh,  Scotland created transgenic hens by inserting the genes for  desired pharmaceutical proteins into the hen’s gene for ovalbumin, a protein  that makes up 54 percent of egg whites.

All the egg whites from these hens contained miR24, an antibody with potential for treating malignant melanoma. The whites also packed human  interferon b-1a, an antiviral drug."

No comments: