Protein drugs made from slobber

Abstract

Anyone who has ever been to a farm knows there’s no shortage of drool dangling from the mouths of barnyard animals. Those super-active salivary glands could someday be put to good use, according to a new study. Zhenfang Wu and colleagues at the South China Agricultural University transformed the salivary glands of mice into miniature bioreactors for producing human nerve growth factor (NGF) proteins in their spit (Sci. Rep. 2017, DOI: 10.1038/srep41270). “This is the first paper that reports production of therapeutic protein from transgenic animals’ saliva,” Wu says. Protein drugs, such as blood-clotting factors and insulin, are often produced in large vats of genetically engineered cells. Sometimes, if bacterial or yeast cells are used, the protein drugs may lack the appropriate chemical modifications that occur in mammalian cells, such as glycosylation. To get around that limitation, some scientists have turned to harvesting the proteins from transgenic animals. ATryn and