Dozens of experiments by companies and academic institutions all over the world are using techniques to insert genes in the genomes of plants, enabling them to start producing enzymes that have pharmacological value. One example of these experiments in Brazil is currently underway at the Genetic Resources department of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) in Brasília, Brazil’s federal capital. Researchers there are developing a variety of soybean seeds contain cyanovirin-N, an enzyme whose effectiveness against HIV has already been proven in laboratory tests during pre-clinical trials.
“Cyanovirin-N is at the pre-clinical development stage, so it hasn’t been tested on humans yet,” says researcher Barry O’Keefe, deputy chief of molecular biology at the NCI’s Molecular Targets Laboratory. “We still lack a commercially viable, low-cost way to achieve large-scale production of cyanovirin-N, and plants are a good means to that end,” says O’Keefe who is collaborating with Professor Elíbio Rech at Embrapa the researcher behind the technology that the team is using.
The latest challenge has been to improve the protein extraction process so as to purify larger quantities of cyanovirin from the soybean seeds. The ultimate goal of the work is to take the medicine to Africa where AIDS transmission is still high.
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The advantages of producing drugs in plants include lower costs and higher levels of safety when compared with human, fungal, bacterial or animal cells. “The future of plant-based production methods is very promising for biopharmaceuticals. This is a very exciting time for those who do this type of research,” O’Keefe told Pesquisa FAPESP.
Read full, original article: Planting medicine
