Diabetes Drug Grown in Tobacco Plants
Last Updated on Friday, 20 March 2009 07:53
For many years now, tobacco has brought nothing but problems to healthcare through smoking. Now tobacco may hold the key to controlling a disease which affects approximately 2.3 million people in the UK.
The technology has been created by European research scientists at a molecular farm lab in Northern Italy. Mario Pezzotti, associate professor of plant genetics at the University of Verona, and his team of researchers have created a tobacco plant which contains a special protein called interleukin-10.
Interleukin-10 (IL-10) is an anti-inflammatory protein which is thought to hold the answer to a cure for autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes.
The problem is that artificially creating IL-10 is notoriously difficult and slow. Current techniques for producing IL-10 rely on breeding cell cultures in a fermentation process not dissimilar to the production of alcohol.
The process relies on stainless steel vats but leading companies in the field including Bayer and Syngenta have been unable to optimise the method in order to make it faster.
The research team at the University of Verona have replaced stainless steel with tobacco. By growing modified tobacco plants, the precious IL-10 protein can be harvested organically at a much faster rate than in cell culture.
Professor Pezzotti said: “Tobacco is a fantastic plant because it is easy to transform genetically and you can easily regenerate an entire plant from a single cell,” according to Reuters.
Professor Pezzotti and his team now intend to extend their research by feeding their modified tobacco to mice with autoimmune diseases to see how they are affected.
The move marks the latest advance in the emerging field of molecular farming, which may offer a cheaper way of making biotech drugs and vaccines than traditional factory systems.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) tobacco was responsible for one million deaths worldwide in the 20th century. In the 21st century that number is expected to reach one billion people worldwide. With so much harm caused by the plant, this new technology may be a productive tool for tobacco to finally produce a health benefit.
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