MBOMBELA – On April 14 2015 a biotech firm surprised the world with its plans to produce a synthetic rhino horn and promised to supply the first of its kind before the end of June.
Pembient, a biotech company based in San Francisco, has produced a synthetic rhino horn which it hopes will flood consumer markets and decrease the number of poaching incidents.
It carries the same genetic fingerprint as a real horn and Pembient uses this DNA, combined with keratin, to produce a powder that is then made into the synthetic ones.
The firm’s CEO Dr Matthew Markus said, “We sell rhino horns at one-eighth of the price of the original, undercutting the price poachers can get and eventually forcing them out. We can produce a rhino-horn product that is actually more pure than what you can get from a wild animal.”
The biotech company plans to release a beer, brewed with the synthetic horn, into the Chinese market later this year.
Research for this project has taken scientists to China and Vietnam where negotiations were undertaken with some traditional-medicinal practitioners.
Markus says his company surveyed users of rhino horn in Vietnam. “What we found was that 45 per cent of people tested said they would accept using rhino horn made in a laboratory, while only 15 per cent would use water-buffalo horn, which is the official substitute.”
He added that there was a big need to continue with the tradition of using rhino horn without engaging in illegal or environmentally damaging activities.
He claimed it was based on a lie and said that the only randomised double-blink trial of rhino horn found that it did indeed reduce fever in children.
Surprisingly, this finding suggests that it might actually be superior to Western medicine since acetaminophen is difficult to safely dose in children and aspirin is linked to Reye’s syndrome.
Pembient plans to sell the first products on World Rhino Day, September 22 this year.
