ABSTRACT
Commercial manufacture of heparin relies on either porcine or bovine intestinal or bovine lung tissue as raw material. The apparent link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy and the similar prion-based Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans (Schonberger 1998) has limited the use of bovine heparin. Moreover, it is not easy to distinguish bovine and porcine heparins, thus making it difcult to ensure the species source of heparin (Linhardt and Gunay 1999). Furthermore, porcine heparin also has problems associated with religious restrictions on its use. Additionally, in 2007-2008, there was a heparin crisis resulting from contaminated batches of heparin (and low-molecular-weight derivatives) entering the marketplace (Liu et al. 2009), causing severe side effects and some leading to death. The contamination was traced to an adulteration of the crude heparin precursor during the process between
the slaughterhouse where heparin was collected from pig intestines and the pharmaceutical manufacturing site. Finally, nonanimal sources of heparin, such as chemically synthesized, enzymatically synthesized, or recombinant heparins, are currently not available for pharmaceutical purposes (Lord and Whitelock 2014). These concerns have motivated to look for alternative, nonmammalian sources of heparin.
