THREE HURRAHS FOR SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY
Medicines comes in all shapes and sizes. There are pills and syrups and there are teas and herb blends, all to ameliorate different kinds of ails. In many cultures, alternative medicine is preferred to pharmaceuticals, and in others it is the opposite.
PHARMACEUTICAL AND NATURAL MEDICINE COMBINED
Earlier today, researchers announced that a lab plant has been engineered to produce a new, potent chemotherapy drug. The drug was initially harvested from an endangered Himalayan plant, and this new organism may provide an abundant supply of the anti-cancer drug, thus making it easier for chemists to experiment and eventually create the most safe and effective version of the drug. It has been a trend as of late for drugmakers to combine pharmaceuticals with plants to devise new drugs, but many plants with countless benefits are endangered.
One of them is the one our lab plant is made in the image of, the Himalayan mayapple. It’s scientific name is Podophyllum hexandrum, and the stubby, leafy plant was once the main source of podophyllotoxin. Podophyllotoxin is a cytotoxin particle that makes up one of the building blocks for the anticancer drug Etoposide. This drug has been on the US market since 1983, and it’s used to treat dozens of varying cancers including lymphoma and lung cancer. Since the Himalayan mayapple is an endangered plant, the American mayapple has been used to extract this cytotoxin, but this version grows slowly and produces very small quantities of the compound.
HOW THE COMPOUND IS MADE
Devising the lab plant was no easy task. Researchers had quite a bit of time trying to decipher how and when the compound is synthesized in the plant, and they came to the conclusion that it is not always present in the plants. Elizabeth Sattely, chemical engineer at Stanford University and leading researcher of the research effort, reveals that it is only when the leaves are wounded that the molecule is made, that it is a response to injury.
This new discovery may give drug making companies and suppliers all over the world a solid and abundant supply of cancer-fighting drugs, and it may lead to better engineered drugs that could work even more efficiently against more strains of cancer.
