Where does YOUR capsule come from?

mrsD · 09-12-2007, 04:23 PM

Are you taking a drug or vitamin in a hard gelatin capsule?

Do you know that cow collagen is the most likely source for this?
Do you know that there is a new movement to replace it?

from www.sciencenews.org (must be a member to access this article)

Quote:

Week of Sept. 1, 2007; Vol. 172, No. 9 , p. 142
Corny collagen

Brian Vastag

From Boston, at a meeting of the American Chemical Society

Slaughterhouse leftovers such as skin, tendons, bone, and cartilage are often processed into gelatin that's used in many products, including pill coatings and capsules. The primary protein in gelatin, collagen, can now be extracted from an engineered strain of corn, researchers report, suggesting that the pharmaceutical industry could go vegetarian.

In 2004, scientists at the company FibroGen in South San Francisco, Calif., spliced a collagen gene into corn and grew a small plot of the transgenic crop in Nebraska. But it took until now to develop a four-step procedure to recover and purify the small amounts of collagen in the corn, reports Iowa State University's Cheng Zhang, part of the team that collaborated with FibroGen to develop the process.

Unlike its animal–by-product cousin, the corn-derived collagen purified at Iowa State in Ames is uniform in composition and should be easier for drugmakers to work with, says FibroGen's Julio Baez. It also eliminates the danger of transferring animal viruses to people via the slaughterhouse product.

"Right now there are 1,000 cows in every cold capsule," Baez quips. After collagen extraction, corn waste could serve as a raw material for making ethanol or other products, he says (SN: 8/25/07, p. 120).

His team is now trying to boost the yield of corny collagen. The test crop generated just 3 milligrams of collagen per kilogram of kernels.

References:

Zhang C., J. Baez, and C. Glatz. 2007. Purification of recombinant gelatin from transgenic corn grain. 234th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society. Aug. 19-23. Boston.

Further Readings:

Wu, C. 2007. Cellulose dreams. Science News 172(Aug. 25):120-121. Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070825/bob8.asp.

Sources:

Julio Baez
FibroGen
225 Gateway Boulevard
South San Francisco, CA 94080

Cheng Zhang
Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering
2114 Sweeney
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011

From Science News, Vol. 172, No. 9, Sept. 1, 2007, p. 142.

I found this very interesting!