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| Research Progress and Application of Animal Bioreactors |
| MA Jiang-Li, SONG Xiao-Hui, SUN Qi, XUE Hua-Shi, ZHU Yue-Yue, YANG Fan* |
| College of Veterinary Medicine/Shaanxi Stem Cell Engineering and Technology Research Center, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China |
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Abstract Animal bioreactors represent an advanced biotechnology platform that uses specific organs of transgenic animals (such as mammary gland, blood, bladder, etc.) as biosynthesis “factories” to produce high value-added bioactive substances. With the continuous growth in demand for recombinant proteins in the biopharmaceutical industry, traditional microbial expression systems and cell culture technologies have gradually encountered development bottlenecks due to limitations in post-translational modification or excessively high production costs. In contrast, animal bioreactors possess the advantages of low production cost, high expression yield, and the ability to achieve complex post-translational modifications, thus becoming an important approach to break through the above technical bottlenecks. From an integrated perspective of cutting-edge technologies including multi-gene co-expression, CRISPR/Cas9 precise gene editing, non-invasive product harvesting, and integrated ethical and safety evaluation, this review systematically reviews the technical principles and application progress of major animal bioreactors such as mammary gland, silkworm (Bombyx mori) silk gland, avian eggs, and bladder; Compares and analyzes the selection strategies of different expression tags. In response to current challenges including low transgenic efficiency, controversies over animal ethics, and imperfect safety evaluation systems, this review proposes improvement strategies based on optimized CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing and non-invasive product collection methods, and prospects future development directions of these technology in the regulation of multi-gene co-expression and large-scale production of biopharmaceuticals, which provides theoretical references for fundamental research, system optimization and industrial development of animal bioreactors for recombinant medicinal proteins.
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Received: 10 December 2025
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Corresponding Authors:
*fan.yang@nwafu.edu.cn
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