GTC Biotherapeutics (fka GTCB)

[aslan2772]

"there is no evidence whatsoever that this would ever occur in GTC’s production platform."

Correct, essentially. We all use the standard genetic code. There are only three ways that I can think of wereby the amino acid sequece could be different in the goat system when expressing a human cDNA/gene:

1) The researchers change the cDNA sequence on purpose ;)

2) The mRNA is spliced differently in the expression system. This would result in the elimination of a portion of the protein. It would be unlikely but not impossible for this to cause an immune response.

3) The gene contains an mRNA editing site (rare) that is not edited in the expression system. This could happen infrequently. However, in theory it would be unlikely to cause an immune response because such sites are usually incompletely edited anways, hence the body should be tolarant of both variants of the protein. Nevertheless, the protein from the edited version may have altered function if the site is critical -- which is often the case with mRNA editing. In this case, it is usually easy to change the cDNA to eliminate this problem.