From Boston, at a meeting of the American Chemical Society
Slaughterhouse leftovers such as skin, tendons, bone, and cartilage are often processed into gelatin that’s used in many products, including pill coatings and capsules. The primary protein in gelatin, collagen, can now be extracted from an engineered strain of corn, researchers report, suggesting that the pharmaceutical industry could go vegetarian.
In 2004, scientists at the company FibroGen in South San Francisco, Calif.,