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Friend of mine had to get gammaglobulin shots for a few years (8 or so years ago): The stuff supposedly cost about 10k a vial, because it was filtered out of th

by gte910h 12y ago

Friend of mine had to get gammaglobulin shots for a few years (8 or so years ago): The stuff supposedly cost about 10k a vial, because it was filtered out of the plasma of many of people per vial and put through several complicated processes to isolate and sterilize it. So...if we had considerably larger plasma donations, maybe?

quasque 12y ago
That would help up to a point, but there also ongoing research to manufacture it using recombinant techniques - that is, genetically engineering bacteria to produce the required protein product and then purifying it out. Then your limiting factor is a reproducible manufacturing process rather than availability of human sources. This is akin to how, for example, insulin and human growth hormone are now produced; previously they also lacked scalability due to having to be sourced from cadavers. So yes right now it's not scalable, but in the future this limitation will hopefully be corrected.