13 ms·

Horseshoe crab blood to remain big pharma's standard as group rejects substitute

171 points by _Microft 6y ago

yalogin 6y ago
Isn’t this shortsighted? Why would an entire industry rely on something that can be wiped out in an instant by some pathogen? Of all people that industry knows how powerful and sudden these pathogens can be. Why risk leaving one crucial aspect of their work flow to chance?
- dharmab 6y ago
  Horseshoe crabs have resilient immune systems; they do not have adaptive immune systems like humans that have to "learn" how to defend from a new pathogen. Instead, their immune systems are general purpose. This is exactly why their blood is valuable for testing for the presence of pathogens in drug and device testing.
- openasocket 6y ago
  Horseshoe crabs have been around largely unchanged for like 450 million years, I like their odds
  - lambda_obrien 6y ago
    And humans think being "smart" is going to get us to the end of time...
    - waste_monk 6y ago
      Earth will die eventually. It might be in ~5 billion years when the Sun itself dies, but the planet will not last forever. To have any hope of lasting on a cosmic time-scale as a species, you need to spread across the stars. There is a very slim chance that somewhere in that vast time-scale horseshoe crabs might evolve intelligence and the ability to manipulate their environment such that they eventually build some kind of means of interstellar travel, but given we're using up resources like coal that will never be replenished, mining all the easy accessible metals, etc. I don't believe it will be possible for another civilisation to rise equivalent to humans in technology, let alone a star faring civilisation. Being smart is what made us the dominant species on this planet, and being smart is the only thing that will get us out of the solar system - really, it's all we have going for us. The crabs might have better immune systems and so on, but I believe that eventually (if we don't destroy ourselves) we'll reach a point where our ability to edit the human body would allow us to patch in a better immune system.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- throwaway2245 6y ago
  > Why would an entire industry rely on something that can be wiped out in an instant by some pathogen? Let me first say that I disagree with the use of horseshoe crab blood: but the industry isn't reliant on it, it's choosing (via lobbying) to continue to use it. If your scenario came to pass, everyone would quickly agree to use the synthetic alternative. But, they don't have to agree on the basis that your scenario might unfortunately come to pass.
- carabiner 6y ago
  I am a horseshoe crab, actually.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
That image of the horseshoe crabs being bled is certainly provocative. > Some of which die after being returned to the Atlantic Ocean following bleeding. I'm super surprised that they even bother. I would have thought this were a simple birth->death captivity cycle. Though I wouldn't be surprised if this were only out of necessity; perhaps the crabs simple don't thrive in captivity. Or perhaps we have less of an ethical standard for the animals we farm just because we like the taste of their milk on our taste buds. Unfortunately, as far as animal ethics go, it feels like progress is so slow that even etching out a comment is a waste of time. It's like being for women suffrage in the 1700s; people just roll their eyes at you, and you hope the people 100 or 200 or 300 years down the road wake up because it's not happening in your lifetime. Then again, I admit it's no simple feat for us humans to have gone from bone and fur and tribal technology to a global technological civilization in just thousands of years. And every awakening and enlightenment is always obvious and taken for granted in hindsight. There's probably even a good benefit to having such glacially evolving ethics: taking a bad fork in the road can kill a civilization.
- arthurcolle 6y ago
  Aren't there some ethical cow milking processes? Like regular, non-Mega AgriCorp farms?
  - vegannet 6y ago
    You can sort-of argue that there are examples of ethical milking if you just consider the direct action of milking, however if we look to the bigger picture of dairy production — which includes how the cow came to be and what the milk is intended for and why the cow needs to be milked — it becomes more difficult because dairy cows have been bred to produce more milk to the detriment of their health: you’d need to find an example of the more broad “ethical dairy production” and that’s a lot more difficult, as almost all dairy production builds on the unethical behaviour of the past.
    - 0xy 6y ago
      Are you suggesting we cull dairy cows to eliminate the tainted breed?
jgwil2 6y ago
This seems like bad news from an environmental perspective. We will end up with a synthetic alternative someday - the only question is whether we will be forced into it by the collapse of the horseshoe crab fishery.
- dharmab 6y ago
  The horseshoe crabs' eggs are also a food source for other animals in their ecosystem like birds.
- pg_bot 6y ago
  Recombinant factor c (rFc) which is mentioned in the article is that synthetic alternative. I have no doubt that it will eventually replace horseshoe crab blood for the LAL test, but it takes time for these things to be approved. You need to be absolutely certain that this test works or you will kill people. We need more data to be sure everything is kosher and it's reasonable to be ultra conservative when you have a working method. There is another method which is arguably worse than bleeding horseshoe crabs that also works. (the rabbit pyrogen test) So even if the entire horseshoe crab population died tomorrow we could still manage to keep everything working without our hands being forced.
  - strbean 6y ago
    A 2018 meta-analysis by Maloney et. al. [1] of 10 studies claims that rFC performs better than LAL. Higher specificity, less lot-to-lot variability. Also, the method is old enough that the patent has already expired, and it has been included in the EU pharmacopeia since 2016. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6200278/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6200278/
ct0 6y ago
Posted by Reuters on Sat 30 May 2020 22.53 EDT
mhb 6y ago
Radiolab: Baby Blue Blood Drive https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/baby-blue-blood-drive https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/baby-...
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  This is a great piece. If you've just come across this story and are wondering WTF is going on, you should definitely give it a listen!
quercusa 6y ago
Saving horseshoe crabs, one by one: http://returnthefavornj.org/ http://returnthefavornj.org/ Big ones can be surprisingly heavy.
deluxe-panda 6y ago
Not really driven home in the article, but migratory birds that depend on horseshoe crab eggs are reliant on an abundance of horseshoe crabs (because eggs are normally buried out of reach, but become exposed when secondary waves of crabs dig up previously laid eggs). Although the industry may be careful to not deplete the horseshoe crab population, it's the lack of an abundance of crabs that causes problems for migratory birds. (As explained to me by a birder friend of mine last month.)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
2Pacalypse- 6y ago
Real Science channel on youtube did an episode on horseshoe crabs recently that is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXVnuG3zO_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXVnuG3zO_0
isaacg 6y ago
According to Wikipedia [0], about 500,000 Horseshoe crabs are bled each year, with a mortality rate of 5-30%, depending on the source. In contrast, about 1,000,000 Horseshoe crabs are used as fishing bait each year, in the United States alone. This fishing practice has been banned in New Jersey and South Carolina, and partially banned in Delaware. It remains legal elsewhere in the United States. Personally, I'd much rather see the fishing-bait use reduced than the biomedical blood use reduced, since the fishing-bait use seems less essential. Of course, I'd love to see the synthetic option reach the same level of trust that the blood now enjoys, at which point both reasons to harvest Horseshoe crabs could be reduced. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_crab#Harvest_for_blood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_crab#Harvest_for_blo...
- yrral 6y ago
  It looks like they drain 1/3 of the blood of 500k crabs a year and use 1m crabs as bait a year. Why can't they just take 100% of the blood of 500k/3 crabs a year and then give those crabs to be used as bait?
  - xutopia 6y ago
    This right here is smart. Maybe there are good reasons why that isn't possible but in the mean time we should be asking that question.
  - hangonhn 6y ago
    I think it's one of those convenient lies we tell ourselves so we can all feel better but doesn't survive real scrutiny. Saying 500k crabs will be drained with most of them surviving sounds better than 175k dies for sure... and we are giving the dead bodies to the fishing industry. The math is going to work out to be the same in the long run (and in fact better in your scheme) but one sounds better as a one-liner than the other.
    - exolymph 6y ago
      That doesn't pass the smell test. We keep animals in effectively torture-houses then kill them to eat them. I doubt that anyone would actually give a fuck if they just killed a bunch of horseshoe crabs. I mean, like, vegans would, but vegans' concerns are already ignored by everybody else.
tzs 6y ago
I remember seeing a segment on the harvesting, bleeding, and releasing of Horseshoe crabs on some science/nature documentary channel. One thing that stood out is that if you looked at the whole experience from the perspective of a Horseshoe crab, it looked quite a lot like the alien abduction stories that some humans tell.
virtuallynathan 6y ago
We also get LAL from horseshoe crab blood which is used for a bunch of research.

171 points by _Microft 6y ago

Isn’t this shortsighted? Why would an entire industry rely on something that can be wiped out in an instant by some pathogen? Of all people that industry knows how powerful and sudden these pathogens can be. Why risk leaving one crucial aspect of their work flow to chance?

dharmab 6y ago
Horseshoe crabs have resilient immune systems; they do not have adaptive immune systems like humans that have to "learn" how to defend from a new pathogen. Instead, their immune systems are general purpose. This is exactly why their blood is valuable for testing for the presence of pathogens in drug and device testing.
openasocket 6y ago
Horseshoe crabs have been around largely unchanged for like 450 million years, I like their odds
- lambda_obrien 6y ago
  And humans think being "smart" is going to get us to the end of time...
  - waste_monk 6y ago
    Earth will die eventually. It might be in ~5 billion years when the Sun itself dies, but the planet will not last forever. To have any hope of lasting on a cosmic time-scale as a species, you need to spread across the stars. There is a very slim chance that somewhere in that vast time-scale horseshoe crabs might evolve intelligence and the ability to manipulate their environment such that they eventually build some kind of means of interstellar travel, but given we're using up resources like coal that will never be replenished, mining all the easy accessible metals, etc. I don't believe it will be possible for another civilisation to rise equivalent to humans in technology, let alone a star faring civilisation. Being smart is what made us the dominant species on this planet, and being smart is the only thing that will get us out of the solar system - really, it's all we have going for us. The crabs might have better immune systems and so on, but I believe that eventually (if we don't destroy ourselves) we'll reach a point where our ability to edit the human body would allow us to patch in a better immune system.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
throwaway2245 6y ago
> Why would an entire industry rely on something that can be wiped out in an instant by some pathogen? Let me first say that I disagree with the use of horseshoe crab blood: but the industry isn't reliant on it, it's choosing (via lobbying) to continue to use it. If your scenario came to pass, everyone would quickly agree to use the synthetic alternative. But, they don't have to agree on the basis that your scenario might unfortunately come to pass.
carabiner 6y ago
I am a horseshoe crab, actually.

hombre_fatal 6y ago

That image of the horseshoe crabs being bled is certainly provocative. > Some of which die after being returned to the Atlantic Ocean following bleeding. I'm super surprised that they even bother. I would have thought this were a simple birth->death captivity cycle. Though I wouldn't be surprised if this were only out of necessity; perhaps the crabs simple don't thrive in captivity. Or perhaps we have less of an ethical standard for the animals we farm just because we like the taste of their milk on our taste buds. Unfortunately, as far as animal ethics go, it feels like progress is so slow that even etching out a comment is a waste of time. It's like being for women suffrage in the 1700s; people just roll their eyes at you, and you hope the people 100 or 200 or 300 years down the road wake up because it's not happening in your lifetime. Then again, I admit it's no simple feat for us humans to have gone from bone and fur and tribal technology to a global technological civilization in just thousands of years. And every awakening and enlightenment is always obvious and taken for granted in hindsight. There's probably even a good benefit to having such glacially evolving ethics: taking a bad fork in the road can kill a civilization.

arthurcolle 6y ago
Aren't there some ethical cow milking processes? Like regular, non-Mega AgriCorp farms?
- vegannet 6y ago
  You can sort-of argue that there are examples of ethical milking if you just consider the direct action of milking, however if we look to the bigger picture of dairy production — which includes how the cow came to be and what the milk is intended for and why the cow needs to be milked — it becomes more difficult because dairy cows have been bred to produce more milk to the detriment of their health: you’d need to find an example of the more broad “ethical dairy production” and that’s a lot more difficult, as almost all dairy production builds on the unethical behaviour of the past.
  - 0xy 6y ago
    Are you suggesting we cull dairy cows to eliminate the tainted breed?

jgwil2 6y ago

This seems like bad news from an environmental perspective. We will end up with a synthetic alternative someday - the only question is whether we will be forced into it by the collapse of the horseshoe crab fishery.

dharmab 6y ago
The horseshoe crabs' eggs are also a food source for other animals in their ecosystem like birds.
pg_bot 6y ago
Recombinant factor c (rFc) which is mentioned in the article is that synthetic alternative. I have no doubt that it will eventually replace horseshoe crab blood for the LAL test, but it takes time for these things to be approved. You need to be absolutely certain that this test works or you will kill people. We need more data to be sure everything is kosher and it's reasonable to be ultra conservative when you have a working method. There is another method which is arguably worse than bleeding horseshoe crabs that also works. (the rabbit pyrogen test) So even if the entire horseshoe crab population died tomorrow we could still manage to keep everything working without our hands being forced.
- strbean 6y ago
  A 2018 meta-analysis by Maloney et. al. [1] of 10 studies claims that rFC performs better than LAL. Higher specificity, less lot-to-lot variability. Also, the method is old enough that the patent has already expired, and it has been included in the EU pharmacopeia since 2016. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6200278/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6200278/

ct0 6y ago

Posted by Reuters on Sat 30 May 2020 22.53 EDT

mhb 6y ago

Radiolab: Baby Blue Blood Drive https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/baby-blue-blood-drive https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/baby-...

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
This is a great piece. If you've just come across this story and are wondering WTF is going on, you should definitely give it a listen!

quercusa 6y ago

Saving horseshoe crabs, one by one: http://returnthefavornj.org/ http://returnthefavornj.org/ Big ones can be surprisingly heavy.

deluxe-panda 6y ago

Not really driven home in the article, but migratory birds that depend on horseshoe crab eggs are reliant on an abundance of horseshoe crabs (because eggs are normally buried out of reach, but become exposed when secondary waves of crabs dig up previously laid eggs). Although the industry may be careful to not deplete the horseshoe crab population, it's the lack of an abundance of crabs that causes problems for migratory birds. (As explained to me by a birder friend of mine last month.)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

2Pacalypse- 6y ago

Real Science channel on youtube did an episode on horseshoe crabs recently that is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXVnuG3zO_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXVnuG3zO_0

isaacg 6y ago

According to Wikipedia [0], about 500,000 Horseshoe crabs are bled each year, with a mortality rate of 5-30%, depending on the source. In contrast, about 1,000,000 Horseshoe crabs are used as fishing bait each year, in the United States alone. This fishing practice has been banned in New Jersey and South Carolina, and partially banned in Delaware. It remains legal elsewhere in the United States. Personally, I'd much rather see the fishing-bait use reduced than the biomedical blood use reduced, since the fishing-bait use seems less essential. Of course, I'd love to see the synthetic option reach the same level of trust that the blood now enjoys, at which point both reasons to harvest Horseshoe crabs could be reduced. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_crab#Harvest_for_blood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_crab#Harvest_for_blo...

yrral 6y ago
It looks like they drain 1/3 of the blood of 500k crabs a year and use 1m crabs as bait a year. Why can't they just take 100% of the blood of 500k/3 crabs a year and then give those crabs to be used as bait?
- xutopia 6y ago
  This right here is smart. Maybe there are good reasons why that isn't possible but in the mean time we should be asking that question.
- hangonhn 6y ago
  I think it's one of those convenient lies we tell ourselves so we can all feel better but doesn't survive real scrutiny. Saying 500k crabs will be drained with most of them surviving sounds better than 175k dies for sure... and we are giving the dead bodies to the fishing industry. The math is going to work out to be the same in the long run (and in fact better in your scheme) but one sounds better as a one-liner than the other.
  - exolymph 6y ago
    That doesn't pass the smell test. We keep animals in effectively torture-houses then kill them to eat them. I doubt that anyone would actually give a fuck if they just killed a bunch of horseshoe crabs. I mean, like, vegans would, but vegans' concerns are already ignored by everybody else.

tzs 6y ago

I remember seeing a segment on the harvesting, bleeding, and releasing of Horseshoe crabs on some science/nature documentary channel. One thing that stood out is that if you looked at the whole experience from the perspective of a Horseshoe crab, it looked quite a lot like the alien abduction stories that some humans tell.

virtuallynathan 6y ago

We also get LAL from horseshoe crab blood which is used for a bunch of research.