>FASTA_22: Eggs!

ViaGen clones polo mares; Threesome IVF babies; In-ovo matriarchy now in stores; Helania’s athletic lactoferrin; Kascaid wants your interstitial fluids; Big pharma's pledge for US biomanufacturing...

>FASTA: weekly short reads of the global biotech ecosystem | Papers and patents, acquisitions and bankruptcies, biotech philosophy | Read in under 5 min | Follow on LinkedIn, X, and now Instagram too! | Versión en Español

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1/10: ViaGen clones polo mares 🐎

Adolfo Cambiaso, an Argentinian polo legend, had dreamed of cloning his fast and agile mare to secure the future of his children in the sport. Upon realizing that even just a son (not a clone) was worth USD $760k at auction, a longtime friend of his suggested they join forces to keep the bloodline in their hands. Together with Crestview founder, Alan Meeker — who contracted the world’s leading pet cloning company, ViaGen — they made fortunes.

Well, that was only until Meeker sold three clones behind his BFF’s back for $2.4 million dollars to pay a $1.4 million debt from his other biotech company. Cambiaso sued him and got the clones back, but who knows, maybe some tissue samples from his precious mare are in some cryopreservation facility, ready to flood polo tournaments.

A truly fascinating story! Even more enticing is to think about how much more fun and money are waiting for biotech builders who know how to look beyond pharma and techbio. I call it for 2028 to be the year we experience the first enhanced [polo] games: get ready to bet on-chain for the best gene mods, folks, F1 of biotech is about to get wild.

Viagen's Equine embryos and a player for Park Place Polo (by Gabriella Angotti-Jones)

2/10: Threesome IVF babies 🧫

If someone’s ever told you it’s impossible for threesomes to procreate, tell them that more than 8 babies have already been born carrying the DNA of three parents each, since the 90s. If you are that someone, you should also know this was not done “for fun in the natural way”, but through IVF which aimed to prevent mitochondrial mutations from passing on to the children.

Have you ever separated egg yolk from the whites? This is similar: choose the least sexy but still healthy person to donate an egg. Remove its nucleus (sorry) and don’t forget to keep its mitochondrial DNA intact (in the “whites”). Then, replace it with the nucleus of the sexy and healthy egg. Finally, fertilize it with the sperm (hopefully equally sexy and healthy) in vitro, and boom, you’ll soon be parents to a healthy and sexy baby!

Grandma’s advice is to be very careful when you’re scooping out nuclear DNA from the sexy egg so you don’t carry any undesired mtDNA along. For very mysterious reasons though, embryos that had 1% of this undesired mtDNA were born with 30-60% of that DNA, a phenomenon scientists now call “MRT reversion”.

Take this AI-generated image with a kilogram of salt as it’s not realistic at all, but it kind of makes the idea clearer: an egg, a sperm, and mtDNA to be combined through IVF.

3/10: In-ovo matriarchy now in stores 🐣