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Animals as Chemical Factories
Horses bled for antivenom, crabs drained for endotoxin tests, and silkworms boiled for silk. Science can now replace these practices with synthetic alternatives — but we need to find ways to scale them up.
A recent study, published in Science Translational Medicine in February, reported the discovery of a human monoclonal antibody that could neutralize long-chain three-finger-neurotoxins, basically molecular tags found in many different antivenoms, in cells. Even after Eli Lilly chemists invented a method, called isoelectric precipitation, that increased the purity of insulin extracted from cows and pigs by between 10- and 100-fold, analyses showed that the purified samples still contained various unwanted peptides and contaminants. After all, CRISPR – part of a bacterial defense system that was first adapted into a gene-editing tool in 2012 – was initially discovered by Francisco Mojica, a Spanish researcher, while studying an obscure (and rare) species of archaea called Haloferax mediterranei.
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