GM Tobacco Plants Could Fight Diabetes
Although tobacco doesn’t have a reputation of being beneficial to health, a team of European researchers has reported breeding a genetically modified tobacco plant with medicines for many autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, including type 1 diabetes.
Led by Professor Mario Pezzotti at the University of Verona, researchers with the Pharma-Planta project worked to create transgenic tobacco plants that would produce biologically-active interleukin-10 (IL-10), a potent anti-inflammatory cytokine.
"Transgenic plants are attractive systems for the production of therapeutic proteins because they offer the possibility of large scale production at low cost, and they have low maintenance requirements. The fact that they can be eaten, which delivers the drug where it is needed, thus avoiding lengthy purification procedures, is another plus compared with traditional drug synthesis," said Pezzotti.
Currently, antibody medicines and vaccines are produced in cell cultures inside stainless steel fermenters, but companies have been trying to determine a new way to make protein drugs in plants.
Tobacco firm Philip Morris is supporting a conference on plant-based medicine in Verona in June, and Pezzotti’s work has captured some attention.
The researchers found that tobacco plants were able to process both forms of IL-10 correctly, producing the active cytokine at high enough levels that it might be possible to use tobacco leaves without lengthy extraction and purification processes.
"Tobacco is a fantastic plant because it is easy to transform genetically and you can easily regenerate an entire plant from a single cell," Pezzotti told Reuters.
Researchers said their next move is to test the plant on mice with autoimmune diseases to gauge their effectiveness.
Pezzotti’s team’s research was funded by the European Union, and their findings are published in the journal BMC Biotechnology.
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