Growing drugs in goats
FDA approves medicine from engineered goats
Potentially opening a new era in farming and pharmaceuticals, the U.S. government has approved the first drug produced by genetically engineered livestock.
The drug, meant to prevent fatal blood clots in people with a rare condition, is a protein extracted from the milk of goats that have been given a human gene.
The same drug, which was approved in Europe in 2006 but has not been widely adopted, is the first to have been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under guidelines the agency adopted only last month to regulate the use of transgenic animals in the nation’s drug and food supply.
Made by GTC Biotherapeutics, the drug is produced by a herd of 200 goats that live under quarantine on a high-security farm in central Massachusetts. The animals have been bred to contain a human gene that causes their milk to produce a human blood protein that can be extracted and processed into the anti-clotting drug.
Proponents say such animals could become a way of producing biotechnology drugs at lower cost or in greater quantities than with the existing methods, which involve extracting the drugs from donated human blood or growing genetically engineered cells in steel tanks. The protein in the goat milk, antithrombin, is sometimes in short supply or unavailable for pharmaceutical use because of a shortage of human plasma donations.</em>
Baa.
