Brazilian equine chorionic gonadotrophine production

Abstract

Brazil currently has the world's largest commercial cattle herd with approximately 220 million head of cattle. The reproductive efficiency of this herd is crucial in order to perfect the production of meat and milk, to supply the domestic and foreign markets with these products of animal origin. The eCG is a hormone used to provide increments of reproductive efficiency in cattle. The use of biotechnology using eCG treatment, such as Artificial Insemination in Fixed Time (TAI), provide increased female fertility of these pets. The IATF associated with eCG provides increased pregnancy rates in herds with low fertility rates and committed body condition, reality of Brazilian cattle. Brazil is the largest exporter of beef in the world, world's largest consumer of eCG, but does not produce the hormone. Despite the high market cost of eCG, when compared to other hormones used in TAI, eCG have offered advantageous cost / benefit ratio in its application in improving the fertility of cattle. The high cost of eCG should be because its production is made by foreign industries. All current world production of eCG is made from the plasma of pregnant mares mainly by companies MSD Animal Health in the Netherlands and by Syntex in Argentina. Even with advances in molecular biology to develop recombinant eCG (r-eCG), to obtain a form of r-eCG large scale economically feasible for industrial production has yet to be developed. To produce the product in Brazil, we will offer to the consumer market a product of the same quality and competitive value, increasing its applicability in the field and productivity in the production chain of animal food. The proposed project already in progress and have been compared different chromatographic techniques on a small scale in the separation of eCG from plasma of pregnancy mares, testing different types of chromatographic resin aimed at scaling technique. It was found the most out of each methodology purification, used for each tested resin. The results were statistically compared between the different repetitions of the same treatment of the different chromatographic resins. The methodology and the chromatographic resins which obtained the highest yield of purification were chosen for the scheduling step of eCG purification. The scheduling step is being proposed in this project for Phase I of the PIPE. In the scheduling step is tested whether the same small scale conditions are obtained in scale and large-scale purification. The hypothesis of this design is that the purification process of scheduling performed by chromatography and purification on a large scale constitute efficient protocol to obtain a purified extract, with high biological activity of eCG, with production capacity of the hormone on an industrial scale. The design innovation is the national production of this hormone high importance in breeding cattle and consequently in the chain of production of meat and milk cattle in Brazil. (AU)