Not only in fairy tale….
People are now able to get golden egg layers, which might bring us happiness.Scientists finally created chickens which can produce drugs for human use.
…This picture might be confusing.
The truth is that chickens whose eggs contain human protein for use in human drugs were successfully created. While a lot of protein drugs are being developed, there was a challenge in how to produce bioreactors. Drug production may become more effective and cheaper by using genetically modified hens than by current industrial techniques.
The scientists inserted genes which produce mouse antibody, which is a possible treatment of malignant melanoma, and also a human immune system protein, which works as antiviral drug. The modified hens by this process produce the desired proteins in their eggs.
The actual process is that scientists injected the desired proteins into normal embryos in the eggs and the proteins incorporated into the DNA of the developing chickens. Hatched transgenic young male chickens were mated with normal hens giving transgenic chicks which also carried the desired genes. This shows the introduced gene can be passed one generation to the next, and possibility of rapid breed of golden egg layers.
In my opinion, even though this new method to produce protein drugs is quite attractive, there are still some disadvantages. For example, a mistake in gene insertion would cause different and possibly harmful substance in the egg. Also, some mutation can happen in each hen, for instance when the layers are grown in stressful environment. When these challenges are solved, these layers could truly provide safe and lower cost drugs.
Yui Tsutsumi
An article a few years ago which shows a prediction on this topic is available here
You may be able to see some improvement in this few years
http://www.vetscite.org/publish/items/001226/index.html
Primary reference
Jones, H., 2007, ‘Chicken eggs make human drugs’, COSMOS online
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/966
Secondary reference
further explanation and information
-bioreactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochemical_engineering
-mouse antibody
http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/43/12_Part_1/5868
- malignant melanoma
http://www.aad.org/public/publications/pamphlets/sun_malignant.html
-transgenic
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/T/TransgenicAnimals.html
No comments:
Post a Comment