Scientists
shift medicinal properties from one plant to another
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[September 11, 2015]
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A number of
important drugs come from plants, but some medicinal plants are
endangered or tricky to grow. For some scientists, finding ways to
ensure ready access to these drugs has become a priority.
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Researchers on Thursday said they have identified the genes that
enable an endangered Himalayan plant to produce a chemical vital to
making a widely used chemotherapy drug, and inserted them into an
easily grown laboratory plant that then produced the same chemical.
The endangered plant, called the mayapple, produces a precursor
chemical to the chemotherapy drug etoposide, which is used in many
patients with lung cancer, testicular cancer, brain cancer,
lymphoma, leukemia and other cancers.
The researchers genetically engineered the easily grown laboratory
plant Nicotiana benthamiana, a wild relative of tobacco, to make the
chemical.
"Many plant-based drugs are not found in large quantities in nature
and are difficult to make in the lab," said Stanford University
chemical engineering professor Elizabeth Sattely, who led the study
published in the journal Science.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2015/Sep/11/images/ads/current/ccaonline_sda050208.png) "Mimicking the way nature makes these molecules is a promising
alternative, but to do that we need to find the genes. This can be a
major challenge because plant genomes can be very large and genes
are hard to find," Sattely said.
The researchers said they discovered six genes from the mayapple
plant that in combination with four previously known genes produce
the chemical needed to make the chemotherapy drug.
"We used these genes to engineer a wild relative of tobacco to make
the drug precursor and think we could also use these genes to make
the drug in other easy-to-grow organisms such as yeast," Sattely
said.
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The tobacco plant or yeast would provide the ability to produce the
drug in a controlled laboratory setting. Researchers led by another
Stanford scientist last month unveiled a new method to make potent
painkilling opioids using bioengineered baker's yeast instead of
poppies.
"Producing plant-derived drugs in easy-to-grow plants or baker's
yeast in many cases will be a much more efficient way to make these
drugs," Sattely said. "This is currently being done for artemisinin
(a malaria drug derived from the sweet wormwood plant), and will
likely be the way we make morphine (derived from poppies) in the
future."
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Eric Beech)
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