Sunday, November 30, 2014

Using Cows with Human Antibodies to treat Diseases

For many years Humans have been using antibodies to treat diseases. It is a very useful tool that has stopped some of the worst diseases we as a population have seen in the 20th century. Researchers at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID) are genetically altering a group of cows to have human antibodies to help with the prevention of Hantavirus, a virus that attacks the body and causes flu like symptoms, and filling the lungs with liquid. The virus has a high mortality rate around 1/3 of the people who are diagnosed, will die.

When the cows that have the human antibody were presented with an antigen, they created antibodies that could combat the Hantavirus. When researchers used the antibodi coding parts of chromosome 14 and 2, they had to combine them with an artificial chromosome then implant the cows with it. This caused the cows antibody coding to stop and use the Human antibodies. When the cows were presented with some disease vaccines, they started to create antibodies resistant to the virus.

Researchers also used the antibodies to test the disease in hamsters. A group of hamsters were infected with the disease, then the antibody strain, and the mortality rate went down by a lot, only 1/8 hamsters died compared to 5/8.

The cure is still a long way away from being completed, but the researchers at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease are very optimistic that this strain will prove a success.
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/11/cows-human-chromosomes-enlisted-fight-hantavirus

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