Farmaceuticalsby Cyrus Ance Farmaceuticalsby Cyrus Ance
Transgenic animals (1) are not new. Genes were first inserted
into mice nearly 20 years ago. Besides the scientific uses of
this technology a recently opened frontier is the production of
therapeutic proteins and hormones in transgenic animals. The
basic idea is to find a gene for the production of a useful
protein or hormone, insert it into cells, grow them, and harvest
the output. There are some problems besides the non-trivial
effort it takes to find, isolate, and insert the genes. Cells
are not the best means of production. Often the most useful
products can only be produced by mammal cells rather than yeast
or other comparatively simple to grow types. In any case growing
and caring for cells is expensive in terms of both materials and
trained personnel. Perhaps the biggest problem is that once a
transgenic cell culture is up and running it is neither cheap
nor easy to expand production. This can be devastating if either
the production level or effec