‘On a farm outside Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a herd of cloned, genetically engineered cattle are busy incubating antibodies against the Ebola virus.
Researchers hope the cattle – which certainly don’t look like anything special – will produce gallons of blood plasma that could be used to treat people with the deadly virus, which has infected more than 21,000 people in West Africa and killed 8,500 of them.
“These animals produce very high levels of human antibody,” said Eddie Sullivan, president and CEO of SAb Biotherapeutics, the company that developed the cattle.
The cattle have been genetically engineered with human DNA so that their bodies don’t produce cattle antibodies but human antibodies. They’re cloned to make a herd of genetically identical, part-human animals.’
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