It takes only half a billion rubles to breed a herd of transgenic goats
Tatiana Lobas, BELTA
Belarusian and Russian scientists propose to develop a draft of the joint program "Belprostransgen-2" for 2008-2012, which is a logical continuation of the program successfully implemented in 2003-2007. They intend to petition the Council of Ministers of the Union State, whose meeting will be held in Minsk in March, to provide such an opportunity to submit an agreed package of proposals at the next meeting in the second quarter.
Alexander Budevich, Head of the Laboratory of Reproduction and Genetic Engineering of Farm Animals of the Scientific and Practical Center of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus for Animal Husbandry, scientific director of the Belarusian part of the program, Candidate of Agricultural Sciences, told BelTA that the Federal Agency for Science and Innovation of Russia is expected to act as the state customer-coordinator of the new project, the Ministry of Health and Social Development of the Russian Federation and the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. As before, the Institute of Gene Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Scientific and Practical Center of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus on Animal Husbandry are planned to be the main performers.
It will take 500 million Russian rubles to finance the new Belprostransgen-2 program, which is almost 2 times more than spent on the first stage of its implementation. This is due to the fact that the second stage provides for higher costs for the construction of farms for the maintenance of transgenic herds, the creation of industrial herds of animals themselves – producers of human medicinal proteins, the development of technologies for the isolation of human proteins from animal milk and the creation of medicinal, food and perfumes with the organization of their pilot production.
In the future, after the next stage of the program implementation, an environmentally friendly industrial production of world-class medicines, food and perfumes will be created. When reaching the planned capacity, Belarus will be able to export $10-12 million worth of lactoferrin annually, while also meeting domestic needs for this unique glycoprotein.
The Federal Agency for Science and Innovation of the Russian Federation has included the Belprostransgen-2 program in the draft list of priority scientific, technological and innovative programs of the Union State. Its full implementation will allow for the first time in Belarus and Russia to start creating exclusive productions of pharmaceuticals, food additives and cosmetics with lactoferrin based on transgenic technologies.
The Belprostransgen program assumed the creation of a scientific and technical basis and technological base for the organization in the Union State of a modern competitive pharmacological production of new generation medicines based on human proteins using transgenic farm animals producing biologically active human proteins with milk as bioreactors.
One of the first medicinal proteins being developed was lactoferrin, a female milk protein with a strong antibacterial and anti–inflammatory effect. The use of lactoferrin as a dietary supplement will reduce the incidence of gastroenteritis in artificial infants by 10 times. The use of lactoferrin as a dietary supplement in food products will be the prevention of infectious, oncological and other diseases for people of different ages.
Scientists of the two countries are still at the beginning of the path to achieving this goal: a modern specialized biotechnological goat farm has been created that has no analogues in the CIS. However, to date, no country in the world, no scientific team has come so close to the possibility of relatively cheap industrial production of human medicinal proteins using transgenesis, Alexander Budevich stressed.
A team of employees of the Scientific and Practical Center of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus for Animal Husbandry and the Russian Institute of Gene Biology, after the most complex and time-consuming experiments, developed a technology for obtaining transgenic goats. Thorough studies of DNA samples of born animals confirmed the presence of a human lactoferrin transgene in two males born in October 2007.
About 200 complex surgical operations to extract biomaterial are behind us. So, in order to carry out only one cycle of donor preparation, embryo washing, embedding a gene construct into cells and transplanting them, recipients need the work of at least ten employees, including night shifts and operations up to 3-4 days a week, not to mention the constant, daily maintenance by the center staff of the entire experimental herd.
With the resumption of funding, retrofitting of the biotechnological center with equipment, the work on obtaining transgenic animals should be continued and significantly expanded. In the summer-autumn period of 2008, the resulting transgenic animals will reach puberty, so it will be necessary to start their reproduction. It is assumed that about 50% of the offspring obtained from primary transgenic animals will carry the human lactoferrin gene.
The urgent need to continue the program is dictated by the fact that it is impossible to stop the biological process, otherwise all achievements will be nullified.
Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru13.02.2008