How to unboil an egg? Not science fiction anymore, researchers have figured it out

Despite sounding like something that cannot be done, scientists have devised a way to unboil egg whites.

A team of chemists from the University of California Irvine and Australia have figured out a way to unboil egg whites and they predict the discovery could transform pharmaceutical and food manufacturing.

"Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg," said Gregory Weiss, a professor of chemistry and molecular biology and biochemistry at UC Irvine. "In our paper, we describe a device for pulling apart tangled proteins and allowing them to refold. We start with egg whites boiled for 20 minutes at 90 degrees Celsius and return a key protein in the egg to working order."

It's "an innovation that could dramatically reduce costs for cancer treatments, food production and other segments of the $160 billion global biotechnology industry," they reported in the findings published in ChemBioChem.

"The real problem is there are lots of cases of gummy proteins that you spend way too much time scraping off your test tubes, and you want some means of recovering that 'material,'" said Gregory Weiss, UCI professor of chemistry and molecular biology and biochemistry.

According to the research report, the scientists believe the process could have ramifications because of how it quickly and cheaply re-forms common proteins, which streamlines protein manufacturing.

Weiss told ABC News that until now chemists assumed once you hard-boiled an egg its cells could not be revived because the heat breaks the bonds that hold together the protein's amino acid strings.

"For example, pharmaceutical companies currently create cancer antibodies in expensive hamster ovary cells that do not 'misfold' proteins," a UCI announcement of the finding states. "Industrial cheese makers, farmers and others who use recombinant proteins could also achieve more bang for their buck."

UCI has filed for a patent on the work, and its Office of Technology Alliances is working with interested commercial partners.