The meatpacking industry is famed for using all parts of the animal except the oink or the moo. Even by that standard, a tiny Canadian pharmaceutical company, BLES Biochemicals, does the industry one better, by collecting an off-white foam — a pulmonary surfactant — from the lungs of cattle at a slaughterhouse for eventual use in helping premature babies breathe, reports Stat, the medical news site.
“In the 1980s, doctors had tried squirting surfactant collected from other creatures in through the tiny nostrils and mouths of babies with respiratory distress syndrome, while also putting them on ventilators. The transformation was immediate: Newborns went from blue to pink. Their chests filled with air,” says Stat.
With those results, a global trade developed in the foam, “an odd corner of the pharmaceutical industry whose existence depended on the whims of the livestock business.” From the United States and Europe to India, companies get the foam from cattle and hogs, with goats a potential source. The biotech industry is developing a synthetic surfactant, which it says will be cheaper and mass produced. “For now, though, the liquid has to make its way from the roar of the slaughterhouse to the sterile hush of the NICU,” says Stat.