Modernize animal pharming with emerging gene targeting technologies

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Animal pharming is the process of using transgenic animals to produce human drugs, mostly in the mammary glands of female animals. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued its first approval for ATryn, the recombinant human antithrombin III, produced in the milk of transgenic goats in 2009. Prior to FDA approval, this drug gained the approval by the European Medicines Agency in 2006. Another drug, Ruconest, produced in the milk of rabbits was approved in Europein 2011. Because of the increasing global demand for human proteins and vaccines, the decreasing volume of donated blood especially in developing countries, and the fact that animal bioreactors can significantly reduce the unit cost per protein by as muchas ten folds comparing to the traditional cell culture based method, it is important to continue exploring and improving the animal pharming technologies. There are mainly two methods to produce transgenic pharming animals, namely pronuclear DNA micro