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Jul 12, 2019

AquaBounty salmon no longer swimming up regulatory stream

It's been an 11-year, $30 million regulatory journey for genetically modified salmon to end up on American plates, and it will take about another 18 months for that to happen.

Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration lifted an import alert that allowed Massachusetts-based AquaBounty Technologies to import roughly 150,000 eggs into Indiana from its facility in Prince Edward Island, Canada. The eggs arrived at an Indiana fish farm in late May and it will take about 18 months for the salmon to reach market weight between roughly eight to 10 pounds.

The whole crux of the AquaBounty salmon involves adding a growth hormone gene out of Chinook salmon that doubled the size of a traditional Atlantic salmon over the same period, as well as adding DNA from ocean pout, an eel-like fish. But the salmon mark a regulatory advance because the fish is the first genetically-modified animal allowed by FDA to be raised and sold commercially in the U.S.  Read the article.