Yeast isn’t just for beer and bread — now it makes opiates, too.
A strain of yeast engineered in a lab was able to transform sugar into a pain-killing drug — called hydrocodone — for the first time. And a second strain was able to produce thebaine, an opiate precursor that drug companies use to make oxycodone. The findings, published in Science, could completely change the way drug companies make pain-relieving medicine. Unfortunately, it may also open the door to less positive outcomes, like"home-brewed" heroin.
Opiates like heroin and morphine are made from opium poppies grown in places like Australia, Europe, and the Middle East — producing the stuff in a morphine drip is an expensive process that takes over a year. An estimated 5.5. billion people have trouble accessing pain treatments worldwide, partly because of their cost. So scientists have been hoping to drive down costs with yeast-made opiates. But until recently, engineered yeast have only been able to make small quantities of a chemical precursor that, through a number of steps, could be used to make morphine and codeine. That's why today's study is so important; it's the first example of scientists altering yeast's genetic code to successfully transform sugar into an actual opioid painkiller. (...)
In the short term, yeast-made opiates might lead to cheaper drugs. But the true excitement is farther down the road: scientists may be able to use this technology to make more effective pain-killers. "We're not just limited to what happens in nature or what the poppies make," Smolke says. "We can begin to modify these compounds in ways that will, for example, reduce the negative side effects that are associated with these medicines, but still keep the pain relieving properties."
The two yeast strains aren't anywhere near ready for commercial use. Right now, they make such small quantities of drugs that it would take about 4,400 gallons of engineered yeast to make a single dose of standard pain-relieving medicine. So the next step for researchers is boosting the drug yields — which could take years. And for once, that might actually be a good thing; health officials and scientists will need that time to figure out how to keep these strains from being used to fuel the illegal drug market.
by Arielle Duhaime-Ross, The Verge | Read more:
Image: (Lily_M / Wikimedia Commons)
A strain of yeast engineered in a lab was able to transform sugar into a pain-killing drug — called hydrocodone — for the first time. And a second strain was able to produce thebaine, an opiate precursor that drug companies use to make oxycodone. The findings, published in Science, could completely change the way drug companies make pain-relieving medicine. Unfortunately, it may also open the door to less positive outcomes, like"home-brewed" heroin.
Opiates like heroin and morphine are made from opium poppies grown in places like Australia, Europe, and the Middle East — producing the stuff in a morphine drip is an expensive process that takes over a year. An estimated 5.5. billion people have trouble accessing pain treatments worldwide, partly because of their cost. So scientists have been hoping to drive down costs with yeast-made opiates. But until recently, engineered yeast have only been able to make small quantities of a chemical precursor that, through a number of steps, could be used to make morphine and codeine. That's why today's study is so important; it's the first example of scientists altering yeast's genetic code to successfully transform sugar into an actual opioid painkiller. (...)In the short term, yeast-made opiates might lead to cheaper drugs. But the true excitement is farther down the road: scientists may be able to use this technology to make more effective pain-killers. "We're not just limited to what happens in nature or what the poppies make," Smolke says. "We can begin to modify these compounds in ways that will, for example, reduce the negative side effects that are associated with these medicines, but still keep the pain relieving properties."
The two yeast strains aren't anywhere near ready for commercial use. Right now, they make such small quantities of drugs that it would take about 4,400 gallons of engineered yeast to make a single dose of standard pain-relieving medicine. So the next step for researchers is boosting the drug yields — which could take years. And for once, that might actually be a good thing; health officials and scientists will need that time to figure out how to keep these strains from being used to fuel the illegal drug market.
by Arielle Duhaime-Ross, The Verge | Read more:
Image: (Lily_M / Wikimedia Commons)
