Medical Reports: Medicinal Milk

WSVN -- Life on the farm can be a good one for a goat, especially these goats.

Tom Newberry: "In this barn, they have everything they could need or want."

Dr. Geoffrey Cox: "It's like the Ritz-Carlton of goat farms."

They're treated like royalty because they're not normal goats. They've actually been created to make a life-saving human drug.

At this farm outside Boston, the goats are genetically-altered to produce a human blood protein in their milk.

Dr. Geoffrey Cox: "This is whole milk. Clarified milk, final product."

Every morning, the nanny goats hoof it to the milking parlor. While they have a bite to eat, technicians connect them to machines where the protein-rich milk is collected. That milk is then sent to a lab where the protein is used to make a new FDA-approved drug called Atryn.

Dr. Geoffrey Cox: "We have 15,000 animals on our farm, and we have about 200 animals that actually produce Atryn."

Atryn is made for people who have low levels of something called Antithrombin, a protein that keeps our blood flowing. If you don't have enough, you could develop deadly blood clots.

The news has the medical community buzzing.

Dr. Luis Villa: "The fact that we now have these animals that are concentrating those proteins in the milk, it's phenomenal. It's cheaper, readily available. It's, in essence, a human factory, but we we've translated that factory into animals."

The company is also developing blood proteins for other disorders.

Dr. Luis Villa: "I think that this is tremendous progress in medicine. There is no doubt about that."

Richard Lemus: "So what sounds like science fiction could be opening the barn door to a new class of medicine."