ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 25, 1997 TAG: 9702250094
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
A BLACKSBURG COMPANY could become a U.S. center for cloning after its Scottish parent company genetically duplicated a sheep.
When news leaked over the weekend that a Scottish bio-technology company has successfully cloned a sheep, the shock waves were felt in Blacksburg, where the company's U.S. subsidiary is located.
Phones rang steadily Monday morning at PPL Therapeutics Inc.'s lab at the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center as reporters - some from national news organizations - called about the genetic duplication of the Scottish ewe and its implications for the Virginia company.
The U.S. lab was not directly involved in the cloning research, however, and the Blacksburg PPL staff referred calls to the company's public relations firm in Scotland.
Tracy Wilkins, a Virginia Tech professor and director of the university's Fralin Center for Biotechnology, said the scientific breakthrough could have a significant impact on Blacksburg.
It could become easier for the company to raise money for research, Wilkins said. And, he said, if the technology is used in the United States, it likely will take place in Blacksburg.
Wilkins has a personal interest in the gains to be made from PPL's discovery. He is the company's largest individual shareholder, although he's no longer directly involved with its research.
PPL Therapeutics Plc was formed in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1987. The company came to Blacksburg in 1993 by merging with TransPharm Inc., a bio-tech company started a year earlier by Wilkins and other Tech researchers.
PPL is working to commercialize human proteins produced in the milk of cows and pigs after they have been genetically altered with human genes.
PPL's projects include genetically engineered medicines to treat diseases such as emphysema and cystic fibrosis and a blood-clotting agent for hemophiliacs. The company employs over 20 people at the Tech center and at a 900-acre farm in the Blacksburg area.
The cloning of the Scottish sheep is a "huge advance in basic science," Wilkins said. The advantage to PPL, he said, is not in the novelty of producing genetically identical farm animals, but in the fact that those animals produce medically valuable human proteins.
To produce transgenic animals, researchers currently inject a human gene into an animal's fertilized egg, then implant it in a surrogate mother. Transgenic animals can later be bred to produce more transgenic animals.
Conventional breeding, however, provides only a 50 percent chance of producing a transgenic animal, Wilkins said. In cloning, researchers have a 100 percent certainty that the animal produced is identical to the original and contains the human gene.
That's because when an animal is cloned, the genetic material comes from only one parent, unlike normal reproduction, which combines the genes from the father's sperm with those from the mother's egg. The human gene can be introduced when the duplicate animal is still a single cell.
In PPL's procedure, a sample of tissue is taken from an animal and its cells are then grown in a laboratory petri dish. The nucleus from one of those cells is then transferred into an egg, from which the nucleus has been removed.
The trick, then, Wilkins said, is fooling the egg into thinking it has been fertilized. The procedure that PPL uses, which is the key to its discovery, is carried out in a test tube and uses an electric current.
Joe Meredith, director of the Tech Corporate Research Center, said he hopes PPL's discovery brings some attention to the center and Virginia Tech. Now, he said, the state's economic development experts seem to think all the biotechnology in Virginia is going on in Richmond, where the Center for Innovative Technology operates a biotech research center.
"There's some really good science going on here," Meredith said.
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: File 1995. Angela Hogan, a Medical College of Virginiaby CNBdoctor, scratches the ear of a pig at the opening of PPL's
therapeutics lab. color.