"This work represents a considerable advance over past efforts to develop avian transgenes, which were limited to the insertion of only small pieces of DNA," commented Dr. Etches. "The technology described here is a general method for inserting DNA encoding proteins of essentially any size and complexity while achieving high levels of protein expression. Moreover, it is the only technology to date that restricts deposition of the therapeutic protein to egg white."
"Monoclonal antibodies have demonstrated great success as human therapeutics, with over 25 approved for human therapeutic use and an increasing number of these proteins in clinical development," continued Dr. Etches. "We expect the demand for more potent anti-cancer monoclonal antibodies and for lower production costs to increase at a rate that will tax existing cell culture production systems. The introduction of this new chicken-based production technology will be of considerable interest to an industry coping with the commercial supply of an ever increasing number of therapeutic antibodies."
"We believe the chicken system is an attractive one for therapeutic protein production compared to either plant systems or to other transgenic animal systems," said Robert Kay, Ph.D., Origen Therapeutics president and chief executive officer. "The fact that the chicken-produced anti-cancer antibodies show dramatically enhanced cell killing activity elevates the chicken system considerably relative to other non-traditional production technologies and some traditional cell culture methods as well."
"Furthermore," Dr. Kay continued, "unlike other transgenic an
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Source:emm4@pacbell.net