Biotech Update: Animals in the New

Biotech Update:
Animals in the News

by Robyn Seydel

The Mouse That Roared

As widely reported in the press both here and abroad, Australian biotech engineers were trying to create a contraceptive vaccine for mice as a pest control when they accidentally created a virus that kills every one of its victims by wrecking their immune systems.

Genetic engineers at the CSIRO laboratory were hoping to stimulate antibodies to destroy eggs in female mice, thus making the rodents infertile.

To do this, they inserted into mousepox virus, (a close relation to the human smallpox virus), a gene that creates large amounts of interleukin 4(IL-4). IL-4 is a naturally-occurring molecule that helps produce antibodies in the immune system.

A story in New Scientist magazine explains that when the IL-4 was inserted, the virus began attacking the part of the immune system that fights viral infection, known as the "cell-mediated response."

All the test animals were dead in nine days. Of even greater concern is the fact that the genetically modified virus already had resistance to the normally used vaccine which worked in only half of the mice exposed to the killer version.

As reported widely in the press, the incident raises serious concerns about the creation and escape of altered organisms that could have murderously disastrous results.

Although vast amounts of resources have gone into policing the military's use of biotechnology, its widespread nature makes it near impossible to police every civilian lab in which it is occurring.

Xenotransplantation: Porcine Organ Donors

These days reality is stranger than science fiction, and scarier too. Genetic engineers have been working for several years to breed pigs altered with human genes in the hopes of producing organs for human patients.

With over 4,000 Americans dying each year while waiting for an organ suitable for transplant and waiting lists of over 180,000 people worldwide, corporate scientists with dollar signs in their eyes are racing to be the first to produce and patent a viable process and pig.

The British animal rights group, "UNCAGED," recently published a report based on internal, leaked memos from the controversial contract research lab, Huntington Life Sciences in Cambridgeshire, U.K.

The report documents the immense suffering of test animals, and technical failures despite Novartis' claims of success.

The memos show at least 520 errors and omissions in scientific data including organ weight not recorded, unlabeled veterinary medications, inadequate surgery records and illegal animal usage including using animals for more than one experiment and the utilization of animals that had tested positive to Herpes B, a virus lethal to humans.

As serious as the inhumane animal treatment and deaths, is the justifiable concern of Porcine Endogenous Retroviruses (PERVs) infecting human subjects.

PERVs are viruses similar to the AIDS virus that are incorporated into the pig genome and cannot be "bred" out.

Harmless to their host pigs some scientists believe that the hundreds of these retroviruses present in any given animal could recombine with human viruses and/or mutate into more infectious forms after transplant.

With scientists still debating whether or not the AIDS epidemic could have been triggered by the utilization of polio vaccines made with chimp kidneys contaminated with the simian form of HIV used throughout Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, it would seem prudent to utilize the strictest care in relation to this whole new species of retroviruses.

Novartis (makers of the leading anti-rejection drug) and Baxter Health Care and their subsidiaries have already invested over $100 million in pig to primate research, funding experiments at the Universities of Ohio, (Columbus), Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), Wisconsin (Madison), Stanford University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Universities of Western Ontario, Toronto and Guelph in Canada.

The Mayo Clinic has opened a large xeno-transplantation program and in conjunction with the New Jersey-based Baxter/Nextran, opened a transgenic pig breeding facility last year.

Not to be outdone, the National Institutes of Health
have invested millions in similar research, soliciting applications
from domestic and foreign researchers on the internet "to enhance the ability to transplant organs and tissues across species barriers."

Patients in American hospitals have already received pancreatic and fetal brain cells from pigs in surgeries approved by the FDA.

For more information, look for the story, "One Man's Meat, Xenotransplantation: A Biotech Disaster Just Waiting to Happen," by Alix Fano in the December 2000 issue of Ecologist magazine.