Washington - California researchers working with this year's Noble Prize winner in medicine say they've invented a quicker, more sensitive test for mad cow disease using genetically engineered mice as "furry test tubes."
The mice could be used by public health officials to screen food and drug products made from cattle or to screen herds of beef cattle, researchers say.
Scientists from the University of California, San Francisco, put cow genes into mice so they could produce bovine proteins known as prions.
When injected with abnormal versions of prion proteins, which are thought to be the cause of mad cow disease, the mice rapidly became sick.
The research team included Dr. Stanley Prusiner of UCSF, who won the 1997 Nobel Prize for his work linking mad cow disease with prion proteins. The team published its findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
When infectious tissue from mad cows is injected into mice that have not been genetically engineered, only some get sick and take about one year to show signs of the disease.
Dr. Fred Cohen, an author of the paper, says the gene-altered mice could be used by pharmaceutical manufacturers to test materials derived from cows, such as gelatin used in drug capsules and collagen in plastic surgery.
They could also provide a "more rational approach" to determine if herds of cattle are safe for human consumption, says Cohen.
The scientists say the research also sheds light on how the disease jumps from one species another, a finding that could lead the way to an even more sensitive method of screening for the deadly proteins.
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