Thousands of goats and rabbits vanish from major biotech lab

[JoeAltmaier]

Just their cavalier disregard for federal regulation should get them shut down.

[crackpotbaker]

Can't really understand how can a body of an animal, which wastes energy on heating itself, digestion, breathing, brain function, be efficient enough to produce antibodies. They must be pricing the antibodies like they're diamonds.

It's hilarious to think how much of a disruptive entity one could be by just inventing a -no-animal-middleman- production process, since almost everyone seems to be insane enough to do it using animals.

edit: thanks for all the explanations...

and downvotes.

[twic]

Animals might be quite inefficient at turning food into antibodies. But they do it very reliably, are really rather cheap to look after. Whereas mechanised approaches tend to be a lot more flaky, and require vastly more capital and technical expertise. The cost of the food that's wasted on humdrum biology is a drop in the ocean of the running costs of the mechanised facilities.

[fabian2k]

It is certainly a rather complicated and expensive process, but I think you're dramatically underestimating the complexity of the immune system. This isn't something you can simply reproduce in a cell culture, there is a lot involved in an immune reaction that finally results in specific antibodies.

[mordechai9000]

Per the article, other companies have entirely switched to producing antibodies using cultured cells created using recombinant DNA technology. Observers suspect the company in question destroyed these animals in part because they are moving to similar processes. It sounds like the disruption has already occurred, as a result of decades of steady, methodical research.

[coldtea]

>Can't really understand how can a body of an animal, which wastes energy on heating itself, digestion, breathing, brain function, be efficient enough to produce antibodies. They must be pricing the antibodies like they're diamonds

Huh? One animal could produce millions of antibodies.

[jjtheblunt]

'Insane enough' only makes sense by not appreciating how absolutely sophisticated the immune system is in the production of its cells. Seriously, it's amazingly neat, and that's just the part that is understood.