One of the long standing goals of genetic engineering was to modify animals to express designer proteins in milk or eggs. Producing proteins in the laboratory is extremely expensive, and modifying animals to produce the proteins could dramatically speed up medical research.
Over the weekend, the team that cloned Dolly the sheep announced they had achieved this milestone. Several news agencies reported that the Roslin Institute, which became famous for its sheep cloning success, has successfully created a genetically modified chicken that lays eggs containing relatively large amounts of proteins that will greatly aid the drug discovery process.
Each chicken will lay about 250 eggs each year, and each egg will contain about 100 mg of the protein for which the chicken is coded. The protein produced is controlled by genetic material inserted into the single cell nucleus that is used to create the chicken, so the protein expressed in the egg can be changed to whatever researchers want to study.
Nicknamed “pharming” by some, ten years ago this sort of technique was purely the stuff of science fiction. Today, thanks to medical researchers, it is a science fact that could revolutionize medical research and treatments for human diseases.
Source:
Dolly scientists create cancer-fighting chicken eggs. Line One News, December 3, 2000.
Dolly team creates designer chicks. The BBC, December 3, 2000.