A Milky Solution

Drinking milk gives you strong bones and makes you grow strong and tall. Mostly likely, however, those handsomely mustached celebrities are not talking about milk that can combat deadly genetic diseases. In fact, the best milk for you if you suffer from a rare genetic disease may be not come from cows, but from rabbits.

Animals have been genetically nipped and tucked for decades to serve as test subjects for drug development. By injecting human DNA into lab animals in their earliest stages of development, scientists are able to mimic the human systems on which they can test their treatments. In the search for a cure for AIDs, lab mice with the human DNA code for immune systems are used for testing.

But animals with bits of foreign DNA - called transgenic animals - are being used in a whole new way. Proteins are the key to treatment for a number of diseases but harvesting high quality proteins in the large amounts necessary for effective protein therapy is costly. As it turns out, mammary glands are very good at producing protein.

While platypi farms probably will not be popping up everywhere, bunny farms might. The first transgenic bunny was the "GFP Rabbit" named Alba. The property of the artist Eduardo Kac, the rabbit was created in 2000 with the help of French scientist Houdebine. She has the genes of a jellyfish and glows a fluorescent green. Pretty useless.

The transgenic bunnies of today are hardly debuting on the fine arts scene. Pharming, a Dutch Biotech company, received approval from the European equivalent of the FDA last summer for 5 rabbit raising facilities in the Netherlands. With the recent FDA approval for the use of transgenic animal products in the US, these rabbits may be making the move across the pond.

The Dutch bunny works hard producing 10 liters a year of milk full of the protein Rhucin, a theraputic protein for people suffering from the rare genetic disease Hereditary angioedema. The symptoms, swelling in the face and abdomen triggered by stress or trauma, can be deadly if the airways swell shut. Since this is not an allergy, the symptoms do not respont to antihistamines as most swelling does. The Rhucin protein harvested from these bunnies could be the primary treatment for a disease presently without other solutions available.

This new use for transgenic animals is very heartening and with cows and goats joining the rabbit as theraputic protein producers, one question becomes unavoidable. We all know how to milk a cow or a goat, but how in the world do you milk a rabbit?