What can it ever be? NewScientist (20 June 2020, paywall) has the answer:
A team led by Goetz Laible at AgResearch, a government-owned research institute in New Zealand, wanted to find out if it could make cetuximab [a bowel cancer drug] at higher volumes more cheaply – by genetically engineering goats to produce the protein in their milk.
First, the researchers inserted genes into goat embryos that carried instructions on how to make cetuximab in the mammary glands. Female goats were then impregnated with the embryos and their genetically modified offspring were born five months later.
The offspring were all female and once they began lactating, they were able to produce about 10 grams of cetuximab in each litre of their milk. Since goats produce about 800 litres of milk every year, this means that each could manufacture multiple kilograms of cetuximab in a year.
“It’s a lot more economic to make cetuximab in animals because their mammary glands can produce large amounts of proteins,” says Laible. The genetic modification didn’t appear to affect the goats’ health, he adds.
Clever – and you can eat the factory once it’s exhausted, too. Purity and efficacy of the produced drug still need to be evaluated, but it sounds really cool, especially if it’s a heritable trait and doesn’t upset the goats.
