Drink Milk to Control Your Diabetes?

Scientists in Argentina said they have cloned four cows that are capable of producing human insulin in their milk.

If these genetically altered calves are capable of producing human insulin then the cost of treating diabetes may have gotten a lot less expensive.

These new calves are New Jersey heifers, and scientists involved in this project believe these calves will be able to start producing the human insulin hormone once they reach adulthood. These young calves have not been name yet, so they are just being called Patagonia 1, 2, 3 and 4.

The biotech company, Bio Sidus, is the one behind this cow-human insulin project. Managing director Marcelo Criscuolo said the cost of insulin could be reduced by as much as 30 percent if this research is successful. Mr. Criscuolo said the insulin cost can drop this much because the model of a genetically altered cow is one that allows for large production of insulin at a very low cost.

Mr. Criscuolo is very proud of the cattle-ranching know how of his fellow Argentineans which is why Marcelo feels Argentina has a leg-up on the world when to comes to research involving cows.

Pharmaceutical products from a cow are produced by scientists inserting a human gene into an embryo. Once this is done, the embryo is then inserted into a surrogate mother cow. To produce human insulin, the scientists inserted the human insulin gene into an embryo.

Bio Sidus started their research by taking a cow fetus from a slaughterhouse, and then removing selected cells from this cow. The scientists then took these cells and merged them with the human insulin gene. Finding a cow slaughterhouse in Argentina was not too difficult because Argentina is the worlds third largest beef exporter.

After the cow cells and human insulin gene were merged, researchers used cloning techniques to take the modified nuclei from these cells, and then these cells were injected into cow eggs. The cloning process starts the egg dividing as if it had been fertilized. This step was followed by scientists successfully implanting four embryos into four surrogate mother cows.

The calves developed from this process were given the titles Patagonia 1, 2, 3 and 4 because of the vast region in Argentina that stretches to the tip of South America.

Cow, horse, pig or fish pancreases were the first sources of insulin because insulin from these sources are almost identical to human insulin. Today, most insulin is produced by genetically engineered bacteria in tanks.

With about 200 million diabetics worldwide, these Argentinean scientists are hoping to have their insulin-laced milk in the worldwide market within the next couple of years.

Read more about cloning cows for insulin at Yahoo News