UPDATED: Some points on the interview.
RE: ""Originally we scheduled a genetic insertion to take place in December," stated Thompson. "We changed that schedule in order to review and confirm our protocols," Thompson continued, "and that short delay is a major factor in our conference call rescheduling. "
What they are doing with the platform worms will be very greatly increasing the speed of all future GM's, so this is well worth the slight delay.
SIMPLIFIED:Ordinarily you have to cross the animals resulting from a GM to get them homozygous (all OTHER GMs (other than ZFs) result in only heterozygous GMs). But ZFs have such a high transformation rate (about 30%) that a significant portion (about 10%) of the animals will be homozygous. If you can effectively pick them out from the rest that saves an entire generation of time. KBLB is using the platform worms to do just exactly that but it's not quite as simple as it may appear. So they are having to work out the protocol for the best manner in which to do that. They're working with zinc fingers, a very new technology and they are doing something absolutely new with it that will greatly improve its use. This is very well worth the delay of a few weeks because it will same that same amount of time on every single GM done with the platform worms in the future.
This is NOT a "problem" in any way whatsoever. It;s just a slight delay to get a much better result.
RE: "I've just received a report from the labs that additional lines of worms have been created using the zinc fingers"
They would have long ago finished analyzing the results of round 1 and the results of round 2 have been due. I think it's almost certain that what he's referring to is the first preliminary results of round 2. If that's so the results should be out shortly. His comment that they are now "in lab production" indicates that the GMs were a success. The difference between lab production and commercial production is scale and that's just a matter of ramping up the population. Sometimes a problem surfaces during the ramping up of production (usually the type of instability problem that apparently occurred. As I discussed that was almost certainly due to the use of the piggyBac, it was expected but just took longer to work out than expected and now it's been solved. So the ramp up should work this time.
RE: Commercial production of Monster Silk this year.
It's now obvious that there was some delay in the Monster Silk. The comment that it is now in lab production indicates that this problem is now solved. IMHO the most likely problem (but not the only possibility) is that it was harder than expected to remove the instability of the piggyBac transposon that was deliberately introduced to created the 5,000 GM's/week that led to the success of the Monster Silk worms. Such things happen MORE OFTEN THAN NOT when doing biotechnology research. If the worms are now in lab production it means the problem has been solved and the worms just need to be ramped up to production scale. THIS PROBLEM WILL NOT APPLY TO ANY FUTURE WORMS BASED ON THE PLATFORM WORM AND MODIFIED WITH ZINC FINGERS. It only ever applied to worms modified with the piggyBac.
So it took a little longer than expected. THAT should have been expected as a likely possibility: this is, after all, cutting edge research. Such delays will INEVITABLY occur at some point or points during development.
(more comments in a few minutes)
