WASHINGTON, Aug 12: A growing herd of cloned calves may provide a variety of human antibodies to treat diseases ranging from childhood ear infections to smallpox, researchers said on Monday.

The cloned and genetically engineered calves carry not just a single human gene, but a section of genes that control the production of many different antibodies, a team at privately owned Hematech, LLC, reported. Jim Robl, a researcher who helped found South Dakota-based Hematech, said he believed it was the largest chunk of genes ever transferred from one species into another at once.

“What we were excited about was the fact that we got a live calf out of it,” Robl said in a telephone interview.

So far the calves produce low levels of human antibodies, but Robl thinks he can find ways to suppress their native immune systems to produce more of the human product.

Then each cloned calf could be an antibody factory, he said, producing a variety of products.

His team first created an artificial piece of human chromosome that carries the genes involved in making antibodies. They spliced this into skin cells from cattle, then cloned calves from these genetically engineered cells. They have about 20 healthy male and female cloned calves that can produce human antibodies in their blood, Robl said.

The hope is to eventually have a herd of cattle that could be infected with a range of viruses and bacteria, causing their bodies to make antibodies to treat human disease, said the researcher, whose work is published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.—Reuters