Hi Bjorn,

I would suggest going back to Eli-Lilly. Alternatively, why not use fish or human GH?

Best wishes,

Colin Scanes

Since Eli-Lilly took over the production, availability of Posilac has become very limited. Like you, I (among others) want to use Posilac for fish studies, but it has become more difficult getting Posilac for that purpose. I thought of getting it through the university dairy farm, and others have tried to get Posilac going through university farms. However, many dairy farm managers who run university dairy unit, as well as veterinarians who oversee the healthcare of university-owned animals, do not want to get involved with Posilac primarily because of the public perception on milk from cows that are treated with rbST.

Hi Colin, To answer your questions, several high-ranking scientists have tried repeatedly to approach Eli-Lilly, so simply trying one more time seems futile, unless the change their policies (as they had promised to do when the took over the production). See also Yasuhiro's response.

The unique thing about Posilac is that each syringe, which is sold to dairy farmers for a few $ contains 500 milligrams (!!) of bGH. If you look up human GH in the catalogs, a few micrograms cost several thousand $ the last time I looked (some while ago). Fish GH is basically not available commercially, and producing large amounts in the lab costs a lot of time and money. But sure, if I could get a good source of fish GH, this would be the GH of choice for my fish studies, no doubt about it.

I just checked the Sigma catalog for the price of human GH. It costs 340 US$ for 10 micrograms => the amount equivalent to a single syringe of Posilac (500mg) would cost about 168.000 US$ !!!

The pricing Monsanto released in 2004 for Posilac was 0.50 US$ per syringe. Thus, it appears that the cost of producing hGH compared with producing bGH is about 330.000 fold.

Or could it be that the pharmaceutical industry has realized that the desperate parents who need hGH for treating their kids for slow growth are willing to pay far more for GH than a dairy farmer who wants to increase the milk production by a few % ?

I am really wondering Bjorn , how come this roduct is banned in EU and you are living there , but you still looking to apply this product on fish for human consumption. Did you read about the drawbacks of posilac on dairy cows health and its consequences on human consuming their r-BST - trated milk???. I believe that working with GH derived from cows , if not available from fish, would give your research more impact and give you the power to discuss your data results confidently. Hope you agood luck.

Dear Moustafa,

You obviously didn't read my question. I am NOT planning to use Posilac on fish for human consumption. I'm using it as a tool in basic endocrinology research, where one of the fundamental, classical approaches is to treat the animal with a hormone to elucidate the function of that particular hormone ( I also use several other approaches, measuring GH levels in response to physiological changes, removing endogenous GH production by hypophysectomy, etc, etc). So far, I've published about 15 papers in the peer-reviewed literature (you can find these on my profile) in which I've used GH (both Posilac and ovine GH provided by the NIH) to study fundamental scientific questions. I've never advocated the use of GH or other hormones in aquaculture and I fully support the European ban on the usage of hormones in animal/food production.

Great idea. In fact my thought went out to increasing the production of fish by such a treatment. Howevr, I'll be so interested to know the differences in the mechanisms driven by both posilac and the other naturally purified GH. Hope you the success in your research endeavours.

Just to give the discussion of hormonal treatment in aquaculture a practical (or impractical, rather) dimension I should point out the huge difference in the number of animals between a fish farm and a dairy farm. Even a small fish farm includes thousands of fish, larger farms tens- and hundreds of thousands. The idea to inject all these individuals every month for the production cycle of one or more years would mean a huge number of injections as well as the need to get the fish repeatedly out of the water for treatment. Therefore, just for the practical reasons of labor costs, injection costs and the adverse stress effects, hormonal treatments with formulations such as Posilac would never be practically or economically sustainable in aquaculture. A dairy farmer only has to deal with tens or perhaps hundreds of animals who are easily accessible for injections.