About the Chinese Hamster Ovaries

Okay, let me just say that mixing my overzealous romantic delusions about Adam Lambert with the topic of Chinese Hamster Ovaries was just too much even for me.

There will be more on this later but here is some food for thought. The medications used to treat Multiple Sclerosis range in price from $2500 to $5000 per month. A very dear friend of mine was recently diagnosed with MS. I don't know what I thought MS was but I didn't know much until now. How perfectly awful! And it seems so ridiculous, your own immune system attacks the myelin which is the casing around your nerves. Some of you are probably close to this disease or know someone who lives with it. This is a life changing event for me and my friend because up until now, ailing and aging was something that happened to other people, not us. She is strong and stoic and when I talk to her, she never crumbles. If her chins begins to quiver, she draws in a deep breath and talks about what she has done to arm herself in the battle or what’s for dinner. She can do that, she has a very toned “so what’ muscle and she uses it when she needs to kick the crap out of life.


So, she is telling me the price range of Interferon drugs used to slow the progression of the immune system’s attack. I am incredulous, sad, livid. She then explains to me why. The drugs are not produced chemically, in other words, the pharmaceutical companies don’t just cook this and add that and make a pill. No, she tells me, they grow the compound in Chinese Hamster Ovaries.


Really? I am still studying her as though she just explained how one might change a light bulb. And then I feel the slightest tension in the corners of my mouth. It starts as a giggle, one that I try vehemently to stifle. I can’t. It’s just too funny. Every aspect, Chinese Hamsters? Not North American or Peruvian or PetCo hamsters? Do they import them or are they churned out of local “hamster farms”. Are female hamsters forced into high-production breeding? I picture little fuzzy beige rodents hooked up to mini-machines, exchanging whatever fluids must be combined to produce something that preserves myelin in a human being.

Seriously? Chinese Hamster Ovaries? I am gone now, I start to hitch and cough. Now she is laughing, we are crying. For 15 minutes, $3000 a month medication, an uncertain future, our fear, our mortality is pushed off. For days Chinese Hamster Ovaries will chase off a number of demons.

So what?