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Engineered Hens Lay Cancer-Fighting Eggs
celardore writes "Hens that lay eggs containing cancer-fighting proteins have been developed in Scotland. While not themselves cancer-antagonistic, the proteins can be used to create drugs that have cancer-fighting potential. The hens are, in effect, factories for cancer drugs. It is still unknown whether the resulting drugs would work in practice, and clinical trials are 5 years off. This research was conducted by the Roslin Institute, the ones responsible responsible for Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal."
Wrong. There had to be a modified egg that hatched the modified chicken.
The egg really did come first.
Engineered Hens Lay Cancer-Fighting Eggs wow, nice.
The protein or the cancer?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I've never understood all the fuss about the chicken and egg problem - they both taste great.
The hens are, in effect, factories for cancer drugs. It is still unknown whether the resulting drugs would work in practice, and clinical trials are 5 years off.
Clinical trials are 5 years off? What are they, chicken?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Someone had to say it.
the ones responsible responsible for Dolly the sheep
:(
So whose responsible for cloning the word "responsible" in the summary?! That's just irresponsibly irresponsibe.
green cancer fighting eggs and ham...
Laying an egg is a job where no engineer has gone before. :P
...welcome our cancer curing chicken overlords.
Man, think about the cholesterol! I'm waiting for eggs that contain a statin and lower my cholesterol.
But seriously, why is this so much better than using a virus or phage as the vector for reproducing a protein?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
(I'm surprised no one else brought this up yet :)
This has the potential to be a great advance in medicine and science related to cancer. Those of you who are trying for funny or sarcastic posts...would you rather have an option other than dying if you were diagnosed with cancer? I know that some folks out there won't be happy due to manipulation of "God's creatures" but if my wife, parents, or me was diagnosed with cancer, I would want as many options available as possible. This really is a potentially huge step in fighting cancers. It is especially important when you consider how few options there are in fighting most types of cancer. Chemotherapy is a long shot most times and makes you sick as hell before you MIGHT get better. Surgery has many shortfalls besides being invasive. This could be a huge step in making cancer a problem with much better odds of beating.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
So now we've created Axlotl Hens? Next step, Axlotl tanks.
Do not anger the worm.
and says, "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken." And, uh, the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs."
What?
I tried poaching eggs before, but the farmer chased me away =(
I agree completely!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
you're screwed if you're a vegan
This is a self-contradicting article. It claims that these chickens have cancer fighting proteins... but then turns around and says that not only is it not known if this stuff will actually work (huh?), but we won't even know for 5 more years.
What, may I ask, is the friggin' point of this article? (Other than to get people's hopes up and sell news?)
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
A chicken and an egg were lying in bed, the chicken sitting back, leaning against the headboard with a big grin on his face.
The egg, looking quite angry and disappointed, rolled out of bed and said, "well I guess we answered that question!".
Engineered eggs and Penicill-Os for breakfast! It's the one-two punch that knocks out cancer and syphilis!
-Peter
These aren't normal chickens...these are cylon chickens!
Super Chicken in the pathology lab! Let me be the first to say...
Bucka-bucka-bucka-bucka-bucka-bucka-BUCKA-buck!!
This product is brought to you by the Unbrella Corporation.
Our business is life itself.
(Some side effects may occur)
I'm still waiting for them to cross chickens with octopii ... everyone gets a drumstick.
Chickens are better than cows. The furst words of the article summary:
Somehow, I don't see cow eggs as being able to compete, either in quantity, or in ease of access, to hen eggs :-)
"Somehow, I don't see cow eggs as being able to compete, either in quantity, or in ease of access, to hen eggs :-)"
:)
Ahh! But what about cow milk!
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Hens can start laying eggs after 20 weeks.
http://gworrell.freeyellow.com/chickenfaq.html
Cows, on the other hand, only start producing milk after their first calf (so 2 years old before they get preggo, then another 9 months gestation). http://www.animalcorner.co.uk/farm/cows/cow_milk.h tml
Also, you can use lower-quality feed for chickens - up to 87% chicken shit.
From experience...chickens can and will start laying before 20 weeks. Ducks too. That's a great benefit with chickens over cows. Plus, chickens require a lot less feed and care than cows. Of course avian flu might have the potential to fuck things up a bit. No matter, a cancer fighting benefit from either is a huge plus.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Oh, about four pounds.
What?
perhaps if they clone a low cholesteral pig, we could enjoy healthy bacon, and an engineered egg or two. and dont forget some engineered wheat to process into some bread for toast. yes, and make it whole (engineered) wheat bread, with a margerine made from engineered corn......hold it, if this was eaten BY an engineer, would that make him/her a cannibal?
"you may disagree with me, but i would lay down my life to defend your right to do so..."
That is actually fantastic news, and should prove to be a huge benefit to the production of otherwise expensive proteins for use in medicine. Well done !!
I particularly like this quote from the article :
'The only real problem is collecting the eggs. Unlike standard chickens, these muthers have 8 legs, and shoot laser beams out of their eyes - which makes collecting the eggs a real bastard of a job'.
A few problems that will cause this idea to take several years to, er, hatch...
o dification Birds don't do things quite like humans do, so the non-protein parts of the drug (glycosylation, phosphorylation etc.) would be different from human proteins. Would these mods. create an allergic reaction even if all egg proteins had been removed? Would they have the same or suitable pharmacokinetics (how a drug moves around and out of the body)? If not, what clinical trials would be needed to find the answers?
Genetically engineered animals and plants have been used to make therapeutic proteins before (but not commercially yet, AFAIK). However, a good fraction of the cost in making such proteins is the purification, not the initial production. Animals, plants, eggs, milk all have to be purified before a therapeutic drug is usable and the costs there are more like phoenix feed. [Such drugs have to be injected, you can't eat the egg etc., the protein would simply be digested in the stomach].
In this age of avian influenza, we'd have to develop ways to test for avian viruses and a way to test for residual egg proteins in the purified drug. Some people are allergic to eggs you know... So that's 2-4 years right there. Plus you have to convince regulatory authorities (FDA) that you've got a valid set of such tests.
And would such proteins be good drugs even if pure? What would be the post-translational modifications? Ooh look, a link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-translational_m
Similar questions have been answered over the years for proteins made in cell culture and by microbial fermentation. Eggs got some catching up to do. Possible, but expensive and a long process.
Mind you, it would be fun developing an industrial egg cracker. Nah, they probably already exist in the food industry. Insert Humpty Dumpty joke.
Ye, we should wait untill nanotechnology proves that organisms are only machines aswel! /joke
I know there are ethical concerns, but things like these can be done ethically and with reasonable risks.
BTW I mean real nanotechnology! Not the precursor we have now! The small machines need to build themselves for a large part.
> I've never understood all the fuss about the chicken and egg problem - they both taste great.
...
Yeah, kind of like snake. Or maybe iguana. Or
Is it not remotely possible that humans were actually genetically enginereed from monkeys by some crazy species long long ago?
I welcome my time-traveling monkey genetic-tampering overlords! I just don't want scientists messin' with the genetics of the veggies and animals that I eat!
Horns are really just a broken halo.
Hmmm... genetically engineering chickens with human DNA.
Am I just paranoid, or is this a good way of helping bird-flu jump the species barrier ?
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Ho Hum. Nice article but a bit anticlimactic. These guys are NOT the first to do this. Roslin institute is more than a year behind at least one other company. A good friend of mine, by the name of William MacArthur who is a brilliant Molecular Biologist, founded a company called Geneworks in Ann Arbor, Michigan several years ago with the goal of creating transgenic chickens that do exactly the same thing as the chickens described in the article. He succeeded and more than a year ago had pure-breeding, transgenic chickens. Before anyone else in the world. He had been in regular contact with Amgen, Genentech, and all the "Big Boys" and also received FDA certification. In addition to creating the chickens, he developed a simple and cheap way of extracting whatever protein had been created from the egg. His company had either one or two huge chicken barns in Southeastern Michigan and they just needed a bit more capital to make it "over the hump" and really take off. Ironically enough, none of the big companies would give him the relatively small amount of capital that he needed to continue because, as he explained it to me, their risk assessment programs were all based on drugs manufactured in a drug factory and as such, they had no way to evaluate his new methods, so they wouldn't give him any funding and Geneworks had to shut down in August 2005. I happened to stop in at their offices as they were loading up the equipment and getting ready to auction it off. However some of his transgenic chickens were donated to a university (I don't remember which one) so that the line could continue. By the way the folks at the Roslin institute know who Bill Mac Arthur is and what he was able to do.
In case anyone is interested, here is a link to a a relevant page: Human Proteins from transgenic Avians
...ever heard of a Scotch Egg? Hardboiled, wrapped in sausage meat, breaded then fried?
Cancer-fighting, yup.
"We have bred five generations of chickens so far and they all keep producing high concentrations of pharmaceuticals"
- the chickens' genes/proteins are for making pharmaceuticals, the chickens themselves are not doing lab work
They will actually fight cancer with bird flu..
Well, apparently I didn't make myself clear enough. I'll try using shorter words.
Simple doesn't mean cheap.
Hope that was clear. Purification costs are typically 2/3 of the COG for a biopharmaceutical. Oh crap, I used more jargon. Scientists in biochemistry labs., such as myself, may be brilliant and admirable, which apparently I'm not, but often they don't consider regulatory and industrial requirements when devising new protein production systems. Maybe they have indeed thought about it in this case, and hence the article's discussion of a 5 year wait which I was partially explaining after others expressed surprise. And trust me on the post translational modifications, they will be different. Maybe this is the wrong forum to be discussing this technology.
Instead of engineering chickens to produce cancer-fighting eggs, which only solves one problem of cancer, why not genetically engineer chickens to lay rocks of crack? That way chickens are 1. providing an economic contribution to society, 2. crack dealers learn the valuable skills of animal husbandry, 3. society benefits from cheaper crack and 4. crack production is outsourced to rural areas producing more jobs.
I called it a mighty Sperm Whale, she called it Finding Nemo.
No way.
Rural drug dealers have already (re)discovered meth. Meth already "fixes" points 1, 3, and 4.
If they engineered chickens that laid pseudoephedrine, maybe then the rural drug dealers would be interested. For that matter, Big Pharma might be interested.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
True enough, but once that cow gets going, she's going to catch up awfully fast, easily making up for the three year delay in first few days.
Given average egg protein contents of 7g and one egg per day, you're going to need 170 chickens to produce as much as one dairy cow averaging 35 liters of milk with 3.4% protein a day.
Now, whether or not feeding 170 chickens is cheaper than feeding one cow, no clue.
Here's a great article on the pros and cons of "pharming" (deriving medicinal properties from animals):
pharming article
"Spiderman II: Spidergoat? It sounds like a sequel to "Spiderman: The Movie" - Spidergoat! OK, maybe not, but it is a very interesting application of transgenics. The dragline form of spider silk is regarded as the strongest material known; it's 5 times stronger than steel and twice as strong as Kevlar. People have actually tried starting "spider farms" to harvest silk, but the spiders are too aggressive and territorial to live close together. They also like to eat each other.
Though the genes for dragline silk were isolated several years ago, attempts to produce it in bacterial and mammalian cell culture have failed. When the genes were put into a goat and expressed in the mammary glands, however, the animal produced silk proteins in its milk that could be spun into a fine thread with all the properties of spider-made silk. This can be used to make lighter, stronger bulletproof vests, thinner thread for surgery and stitches or indestructible clothes."
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