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Edible animal vaccines on market soon
July 21, 2002 8:46pm
Anthony Tran
07/22/2002
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DNA Inc, a local biotechnology company, says it is close to
marketing transgenic vaccines to protect livestock against
contagious diseases.
The vaccines are at the final stage of clinical testing and the
results would be out "in the next few months", the company's
majority shareholder Dominic Lam said.
Transgenic vaccines are basically edible vaccines derived from
genetically engineered food crops.
"During the late 80s I was thinking about inexpensive and
easy-to-administer vaccines," said Lam, who was one of the founding
directors of Hong Kong Institute of Biotechnology between 1988 and
1992.
As a result, Lam teamed up with Charles Arntzen in the US in 1995
to develop the technology to transplant the proteins of a vaccine
into edible plants such as tomatoes and potatoes.
The transplanting technology is called the transgenic
deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) technology, transferring the genes from
one species to another.
However, as human vaccines take a very long time to get approval
from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Lam decided apply
the technology to animals.
"When I got back to Hong Kong in 1998 I discovered that China had
many animal diseases for which they had no good vaccines," Lam said.
So he teamed up with Fred Leung, dean of science at the
University of Hong Kong, to apply his transgenic DNA technology to
animal feed. He then founded DNA Inc to focus on developing various
transgenic animal vaccines, embedding them in feed..
"These [animal] vaccines are undergoing clinical testing in pigs
now," Lam said. "We'll know the results in the next few months." Lam
said transplanting the vaccines into feed could replace the use of
injection vaccines in the mainland.
"If you test an animal vaccine it takes only two or three
months," he said, "and as the vaccines are based on DNA and
proteins, they have no side effects." Source: The Standard.
Copyright 2002. All Rights Reserved.
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