Priscilla A. Furth

Transgenic Animals as Bioreactors for Therapeutic and Nutritional Proteins

The development of molecular “pharming” technology culminated in transgenic animals whose mammary glands were converted into bioreactors producing human proteins. This was achieved with interdigitative efforts by several branches of science — molecular biology, embryology, and protein chemistry. Protein chemistry helps to identify sequences of milk proteins, molecular biology provides the tools for the isolation of genetic regulatory elements that target gene expression to mammary tissue, and embryology is critical for the introduction of novel genes into embryos from which transgenic animals are derived. An important focus of current investigation in the field of mammary biotechnology comes from our accumulating understanding of molecular gene switches in the context of complex chromatin.