Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)

[Deannie]

Months ago I posited harvesting actual spider silk in relatively small quantities which was soundly pooh-poohed here (Harvesting real spider silk undermines KBLB raison d‘etre) because as everyone “knows”, it’s prohibitively costly to harvest spider silk. Maybe that’s not true as it turns out. Reading the article you posted (and following the links to related medical paper publications) revealed that a single spider (I won’t get into specific type, etc.) produces 500 meters of dragline silk at a rate mechanically induced (without harming the spider) at a rate of 150 meters per hour. With the prostate nerve regeneration surgeries having shown success with spider silk bundles helping to regrow nerves over a 5-8cm span, it’d be nice to know what length of silk was needed to create the silk bundles (multiple strands of silk) spanning such a small gap but I wasn’t able to find that (don’t care to spend any more time digging). I’d guess it’d be in the hundreds of meters but probably no more than a few thousand. Whatever that number is, I got the impression it wasn’t an exorbitant number and could easily be produced by just a few spiders. VERY interesting and could hold promise for those with spinal and other nerve injuries that could hep them, walk, see, “get it up”, etc.. if this natural spider silk gets approved for widespread medical use, they could charge many hundreds if not thousands of dollars for each surgical bundle. I know it could be argued that KBLB’s silk could be used in the same capacity as the real spider silk, but nowhere did I see anything in the article/s about transgenic spider-ish silk, just the real stuff.