Dr. M said:
Human sourcing is one way to obtain hCG, but the most common method nowadays is to transform E.coli DH5alpha with a plasmid containing the gene for hCG, placing a constitutive promoter in front of the gene. This means that the bacteria are ALWAYS producing the hCG from the gene (constitutive promoter = always on), and it's thus produced in very high amounts. By taking this fermentation product and purifying the hCG via large-scale HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography), they can obtain extremely pure product with no risk of human disease transmission, in very large amounts, at much less cost than collection of pregnant women's urine.
This sort of thing can also be done in human cell culture, but it's much easier to transform bacteria than it is to transfect human cell lines (in general).
At any rate, the purification is extremely rigorous, and any intact virus particles (if they were present in the first place) would be removed in the first selective precipitation steps, and wouldn't have a chance of co-eluting with the intact peptide in HPLC.
Hope this sort of clears things up,
-M
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The donors have to go through a screening process.(Big deel as hiv has a window period of 3-5 mos) but also with the lyophilized poly-peptide hormones,they're very agressive with their purification process.
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