Scientists may someday be able to use genetically modified hens to produce drugs in the whites of their eggs to treat cancer, arthritis and other diseases such as bird flu, a report released Tuesday reveals.

The technology "signifies an important advance in the use of farm animals for pharmaceutical production," the scientists said in a statement.

Researchers led by Helen Sang of the Roslin BioCentre in Edinburgh, Scotland, created transgenic hens by inserting the genes for desired pharmaceutical proteins into the hen's gene for ovalbumin, a protein that makes up 54 percent of egg whites.

"With the demand for therapeutic protein drugs increasing, the efficient generation of transgenic hens that produce functional protein drugs at high levels in egg whites marks an important step in the development of this technology," according to a statement released by the Proceedings of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, which published the research in its online edition.

Traditional methods for producing therapeutic proteins such as antibodies used to treat cancer and arthritis are expensive. Farm animals could produce them faster and cheaper, the thinking goes.

All the egg whites from these hens contained miR24, an antibody with potential for treating malignant melanoma. The whites also packed human interferon b-1a, an antiviral drug.

(Agencies)