Anti-Cancer Eggs from GM Hens
The same institute near Edinburgh who gave us Dolly (the cloned sheep) – Roslin Institute – have bred a 500-strong flock of ISA Browns (a common breed of egg-laying hen), that are the world’s first breed of designer chickens that have been genetically modified to lay eggs capable of producing drugs that will fight cancer and other serious diseases.
The GM chickens each had human genes inserted into their DNA that enables them to produce complex medicinal proteins which are then secreted into the whites of the birds’ eggs which could later be extracted to produce drugs.
- One of the chicken lines produces human interferon of a kind closely resembling a drug widely used to treat multiple sclerosis.
- Another line could be useful in treating skin cancer, by producing miR24, an antibody that could also potentially treat arthritis, which afflicts 7m people in Britain.
- The institute is understood to have created at least two other lines of genetically modified chicken, whose eggs could produce drugs with the potential to fight cancer.
The Roslin team headed by Dr. Helen Sang will describe how they extracted embryonic cockerels from hens, before the eggs had formed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Read the full report at UK Times Online.
[hat tip: Hsien-Hsien Lei]
Tags: anti-cancer-drugs, genetic-engineering, GM-Hens, ISA-BrownsRelated Stories
POSTED IN: ~ Anti-cancer treatments ~, ~ General Comments ~
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