What is the advantage of using transgenic bacteria to produce human proteins?
Transgenic bacteria can be created by using a virus as a vector to insert the human gene required, or by inserting recombinant plasmids with the gene in them into the bacteria. These bacteria can be cultured in a growth medium on an enormous scale, like fermentation to produce beer. The protein can then be tapped off and processed and refined. The advantages are that it can be done on a huge scale, and doesn’t have to be extracted from an animal or a human. This makes it a lot cheaper, and safer because there is no issue of contamination with diseases. For example, factor VIII for people with haemophilia used to have to be given as a blood transfusion from another human, but pretty much every person who received these transfusions eventually died of HIV/AIDS they caught from the blood. Now, factor VIII is produced by bacteria and is completely clean, safe, far cheaper and more readily available and easy to use.
