Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)

[ZincFinger]

That timeline is not applicable to KBLB. The timeline for creating zinc fingers for use in human research is a lot longer and for good reasons.

Zinc fingers can very rarely cause unintended effects due to cross reactions with unintended sequence. The rate of such reactions is vastly lower with zinc fingers than with all other methods of genetic modifications. That's not a worry if you're doing it on silkworms, if you kill a few, it's no big deal. But because it can happen you have to do a lot of tests to rule it out if the use is for something in human therapeutics. (in cell cultures etc.)

You don't have to do that for other uses: if you kill a few silkworms, no big deal, just order a different version of the zinc fingers. And it's extremely rare so it wouldn't make sense to waste time on all the tests beforehand. Because the extensive testing isn't required, you could probably get your replacement ZF's, if required long before someone ordering ZFs for human therapeutics got their first set.

My estimate would be under a week for zinc fingers NOT intended for human therapeutics.

Such considerations are, IMHO, a major reason that SIAL chose KBLB for its "poster child" for its zinc finger service - they wanted an application that could get something on the market in the public's eye as fast as possible.