Turning A Cow Into A Living Laboratory Could Save Your Life

The research, carried out by the U.S. Army’s medical research department and some assorted allies, resulted in a study newly published in Science, which you can read here if you speak scientist. It’s some pretty amazing work that doesn’t just indicate big things down the road — this is a big thing, right now. Cows could grow an estimated 1,000 doses of a potential treatment per month.

Here’s how it works. Animals, including humans, produce our own antibodies, proteins that target bacteria and viruses that want to do us harm. With some illnesses, antibodies would help, but the body can’t produce enough of them fast enough, and only an injection from an outside source would do the trick. Except: some antibodies — there are tons of different kinds, which the body uses for all different sorts of illnesses — can’t be made synthetically. Sometimes we can extract them from another person, but sometimes that’s not an option either.

As Gizmodo notes, scientists have been trying to figure out a way to get some other animal to produce human-compatible antibodies for decades, but it’s a difficult prospect. The antibodies need to be specifically human; an antibody naturally grown in a pig’s body would be destroyed on-sight by our own immune systems. But what if we could trick an animal into disabling the production of its own native antibodies in favor of antibodies that would work for humans?

The cow is a great subject for that kind of work. It’s well-understood, thanks to eons of domestication, and it’s also, well, huge, which means it can produce an awful lot of anything: poop, methane, milk, steaks, or, yes, antibodies. The first attempt was done with hantavirus, a sometimes deadly virus found in various forms all over the world. The scientists managed to get the cow, through careful gene manipulation, to grow human-compatible antibodies, and lots of them.

They’ll be doing some trials on this specific antibody soon, but also begin expanding to other illnesses. Who knows? The next treatment you get might come from a cow.

(via Gizmodo, image via Flickr user fdocomite)

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