FDA Ruling Could Boost Texas Biotech Firm
To get in the black, ViaGen must figure out how to lower the cost of cloning, make it affordable to cow and pig farmers, and gear up for the demand that may follow. "The good news is that this won't happen overnight," says Walton. He compares mass cloning to manufacturing. "From the first time someone develops a prototype, it's a long ways before they produce it at scale," he says. Walton expects to clone about 200 animals in 2007 and up to 800 the following year. Before that happens, ViaGen has work to do. It plans to add 16 people to its staff of 40 in 2007.
A hit-or-miss process
The first step for breeders who want to buy clones is to purchase ViaGen's $1,500 biopsy kit, which enables them to collect cells from the tissue of animals they want to duplicate. Cells are stored in vats of liquid nitrogen until a breeder decides to clone an animal. Then ViaGen replaces the genetic material of a harvested egg with that of the animal to be cloned, using a device whose controls resemble video-game joysticks. It takes a few hours to screen 600 eggs to find ones that will work. From that batch, maybe 50 end up as embryos.
A couple of days later, if the transfer takes, the embryo is implanted into a prescreened surrogate mother. Cloning is a hit-or-miss process. There is about a 60 percent chance that the DNA will take to the egg and then about a 30 percent chance that the egg will become an embryo, says Irina Polejaeva, ViaGen's chief scientific officer. Improving those odds is a key to lowering costs.
While the high-tech process takes place at ViaGen's tiny lab in an Austin office park, embryos packed in a cooler are shuttled by pickup truck to a more bucolic locale. The implants take place at one of the company's Texas ranches. Once a heifer gets pregnant, it behaves just like any other animal that is expecting, says animal resource supervisor Nanci Williams.
She has been watching over the 12 longhorn calves at ViaGen's ranch in Bucholz, Texas, while they nurse and notes that the group is friskier than others she has seen. "It's like KinderCare out there," she says. "But they are just cows being cows." After two more weeks at the ranch, the calves go to their owner, who breeds the animals for longhorn showcases.
Once FDA approval is complete, commercial livestock farmers will gradually get into the game to duplicate their fattest pigs and best cows, says Barbara Glenn, managing director of animal biotechnology at the Biotechnology Industry Organization. Because of the technique's cost, only a handful of farmers can afford now to clone their most productive animals. Right now, their genes are spread using other artificial-breeding methods such as embryo transfer. Cloning will improve the process because it increases the chances of producing a top-notch animal. In the end, the offspring of the pricey clones are the ones that will end up producing milk or being slaughtered, Glenn explains.
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