tahoe city, california

The University of California at Davis has created a centre for transgenic research in large animals, which it hopes will be the first of a nationwide system of university-based facilities advancing biomedical and agricultural science.

Opened last month with university funds, the centre will conduct research in pigs, sheep, goats and potentially cattle, all of which are being studied as sources of proteins, drugs and transplant organs. Its founders hope that the centre will maximize the dissemination of science in a field where many results are closely guarded by the corporations that pay for them.

Davis researchers say they intend to push for a network of four large-animal research centres based at universities across the United States. They see these centres — which would centralize expertise for other universities to use — as a way to save money in an extremely expensive field.

Most US universities use mice, which are cheap and easy to study, for transgenic research. As techniques and results have improved, researchers want to study larger animals. But a single experimental pig can cost more than $100,000, a sheep or goat $75,000, and a cow anything from $500,000 to $1 million.

“We want to provide the opportunity for researchers to do a variety of studies” from transgenics to cloning, says James Murray, a Davis geneticist who founded the centre with physiologist Gary Anderson. Both discussed the new centre last week at the university's second Transgenic Animal Research Conference at Tahoe City.

After three years of planning, the centre is being funded initially with about $750,000 in campus funds, designated under a special programme for new initiatives. The centre is a collaboration between animal science, the veterinary school and the medical school. Already, researchers from the University of California campuses at San Francisco and San Diego are considering carrying out large-animal projects at the Davis centre. And the Davis team is recruiting researchers for new project grants.

Caird Rexroad, an associate deputy director of the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Maryland, says he sees the concept as worthy of close study. Research in larger animals “needs to be more efficient to move it along,” says Rexroad, a reproductive physiologist.

He adds: “There is a significant role for the public sector in this research to build knowledge to which a lot of people will have access.”