A majority of the advantages of Pharming are economical. Pharming is a cheaper alternative to creating pharmaceuticals in a laboratory. The money invested in research and manufacture is reduced and medicine becomes cheaper and more affordable. It is estimated Pharming makes drugs at $1-2 per gram while factories spend around $150 per gram. Traditional factories cost $200m-$400m and take 3-5 years to construct while a herd of genetically modified goats take $100m and 18 months to grow. Due to the lower price of pharmaceuticals produced by Pharming. People who could not afford medicines in the past are given an opportunity to live healthier. Mass producing pharmaceuticals with Pharming also provides health-based charities with more medicines so they can expand their influence and assist more people. The World Health Organisation estimates that almost 3 million people die from preventable diseases, mostly in underdeveloped countries. If the most basic medicines were readily available to them countless lives can be saved. Even though process of creating a transgenic animal is expensive and time consuming, when the animal starts producing it's drug the investment begins to pay off economically. Pharming is still quite a new industry and requires science experts to assists in research and development. This opens up jobs which helps the economy
Summary: - Cheaper medicine - Job opportunities - Less production costs - Assisting charities
Cons of Pharming:
Genetically engineered animals are often subject to ethical debates surrounding treatment of animals. Using animals to produce drugs purely for the benefit of humans can be considered unethical. There are concerns to whether the animals are being treated fairly as sentimental being, or as living factories.
Furthermore, many offspring of transgenic animals are born with abnormalities or do no produce the correct drug. Also, many eggs are examined when searching for one to implant into a host animal and, most of the time, the donors are sacrificed in the process. Dolly the first cloned mammal was expected to live for 11 years but died at 6.5 years of age. Dolly was put down because she had sever arthritis and a lung disease, which are symptoms present in old sheep. However Dolly died nearly half a lifetime earlier than normal sheep perhaps due to the effects of genetic engineering.
Genetically modified drugs can potentially harm human health. Despite humans and animals having similar proteins, proper testing guidelines have not been established. This means use of modified pharmaceuticals could have the ability to harm the human body because they have not been thoroughly tested.
No matter how secluded and isolated gm(genetically modified) organisms are grown, there is always the risk that can breed with their pure counterparts and create contamination. Wind can carry pollen and seeds of gm crops to a neighbouring farm which grows normal crops for human consumption. The pollen and seeds can fertilized the soil of the neighbour farm and gm food can wind up in supermarkets and unknowingly sold for consumption.
An example of a contamination was the Prodigene Incident of 2002. The company Prodigene produced corn injected with the protein avidin. After the harvest some kernels were left on the ground and not long after soybeans intended for human consumption were planted. When the soybeans were harvested parts of the leftover corn was mixed with the soybeans. Prodigene was heavy fined and punished for their mistake and the potential harm they could have caused the human population.
Summary: - Unfair toward animals - Potentially dangerous towards humans - Can contaminate food crops