Animals might be quite inefficient at turning food into antibodies. But they do it very reliably, are really rather cheap to look after. Whereas mechanised approaches tend to be a lot more flaky, and require vastly more capital and technical expertise. The cost of the food that's wasted on humdrum biology is a drop in the ocean of the running costs of the mechanised facilities.

It is certainly a rather complicated and expensive process, but I think you're dramatically underestimating the complexity of the immune system. This isn't something you can simply reproduce in a cell culture, there is a lot involved in an immune reaction that finally results in specific antibodies.

There are recombinant antibodies produced in bacteria/yeast lines.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3906537/

The article linked gives a good summary of state of the art (as of 2014) of antibody production.

In short, to create full length antibodies, we need mammalian cells to perform modification to the protein after its been synthesized to become a full antibody.

However, maintaining large cell cultures of mammalians cells is actually a huge head ache - it really is easier just to maintain the whole creature. And once you're at that phase, you can not only take advantage of all the mammalian cellular machinery, but you can take advantage of the whole milk thing (remember milk is a good source of protein? All that protein is synthesized and PUT into there. Adding another protein to the mix is relatively straight forward).

Put another way, using whole mammals to grow antibodies is roughly as insane as using whole mammals for meat or milk. Sure, if you can overcome the massive scientific and engineering hurdles, there are theoretically more energetically efficient ways to do it. But good luck.

yeah, meat and milk, insane too.

I'd rather not filter all that food through an animal, I'd gladly get the cheap quality nutrients up front.

Per the article, other companies have entirely switched to producing antibodies using cultured cells created using recombinant DNA technology. Observers suspect the company in question destroyed these animals in part because they are moving to similar processes. It sounds like the disruption has already occurred, as a result of decades of steady, methodical research.

>Can't really understand how can a body of an animal, which wastes energy on heating itself, digestion, breathing, brain function, be efficient enough to produce antibodies. They must be pricing the antibodies like they're diamonds

Huh? One animal could produce millions of antibodies.

'Insane enough' only makes sense by not appreciating how absolutely sophisticated the immune system is in the production of its cells. Seriously, it's amazingly neat, and that's just the part that is understood.