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next few months they are really going to support and be active in the making of interferon, probably by recombinant DNA.
Is this process --
I don't know how long it will take. It can take 18 months.
It can take two years. It can take three years. We don't know what the time schedule on this thing will be.
You mean, in order to manufacture it?
In order to manufacture it. But it's very exciting.
Well, what's the experience of the Finnish people?
Well, the Finnish have been making it from white cells of human blood. It is only about one tenth of one percent pure. You can't make anything from white cells of human blood on a large enough scale to take care of the size of the demand. There will be too big a demand of that. And it's much too impure and expensive, infinitely too expensive. The material that we now use is from the Red Cross in Finland. It's Karl Cantell's material, but it's very, very expensive, like $25 a shot. $25 a million units. And this is, you know, beyond what anything can be done --
Yes, prohibitive. So this place in California is going to attempt its manufacture.
We hope they can make it. We hope that Hoffman La Roche may be able to make it. They've already purified it, two kinds of interferon, Hoffman La Roche has. And Merck is trying to make an interferon inducer. Now, I doubt that an interferon inducer will really finally work. I think in the end they're going to
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