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Pharming allows harvesting of HIV drug
In the perfectly controlled atmosphere of a brick-proof, hermetically sealed greenhouse deep in the Kent countryside, a fresh crop of tobacco plants is beginning to flourish. There is nothing unusual about the plants’ appearance, but they are nonetheless extraordinary.
A genetic tweak ensures that every cell of every plant churns out tiny quantities of an experimental drug. When harvested, they could bring cheap medicine to millions. Scientists say the £8m project could provide a powerful weapon against Africa’s HIV pandemic.
The process is called pharming, and to many it is both the future of GM crops, and the future of the drugs industry. If the tobacco plants in Kent are a success, each one will provide 20 doses of an anti-HIV drug — enough to protect a woman from infection for up to three months.
Pharming is a marriage of high and low technology that capitalises on the advantages of both. Instead of needing a $500m drug manufacturing facility that takes five years to pass regulatory approval, pharming uses simple crop-growing practices that have been honed over centuries.
Like other GM technologies, pharming is not without its risks. Pressure groups such as Friends of the Earth fear that if food crops such as maize or tomatoes are adopted to grow drugs in some regions, there is a risk of their contaminating maize or tomato crops elsewhere that are intended for consumption. Clare Oxborrow, FoE’s GM campaigner, said: “We wouldn’t want to see this done in food crops and certainly not in field trials.”
The agency’s first July 4 launch in 45 years of manned spaceflight provided a welcome distraction from the controversy about the safety of the fuel tank’s foam insulation and the frustration of two aborted liftoffs owing to poor weather at the Kennedy Space Centre.
“I can’t think of a better place to be on the Fourth of July,” said Steve Lindsey, the shuttle commander, moments before Discovery roared into a clear Florida sky. The crew of seven, including the British-born astronaut Piers Sellers, 51, enjoyed an apparently flawless ascent to orbit after the launch at 2.38pm local time.
Thunderstorms that had threatened to cause a third postponement remained at sea. “Today was one of our better days. They don’t get much better than this,” said Dr Michael Griffin, the Nasa administrator.
Mission managers immediately began a painstaking study of images from 107 cameras on the ground and aboard the spacecraft to check for any damage sustained during the first minutes of its 13-day, 5m-mile mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Pictures shown on Nasa TV showed three or four chunks of debris falling from the fuel tank two minutes and 47 seconds into the flight. Another two pieces fell around two minutes later, though it was unclear whether any struck Discovery.
“The heat doesn’t just provide comfort and have a placebo effect — it actually deactivates the pain at a molecular level in much the same way as pharmaceutical painkillers,” said Brian King, a senior lecturer in physiology at University College London, who led the research.
Dr King found that if heat of more than 40C is applied to the skin near where internal pain is felt, it switches on heat receptors at the site of injury. These in turn block the body’s ability to detect pain. He presented his findings at the annual meeting of the Physiological Society.
“Heat is recognised by a group of receptors called transient receptor potential channels,” said Dr King. “One of them, TRP1, responds to heat at around 40C. It’s known to be on the sensory nerves that supply the internal organs like the gut.”
When someone feels pain in the gut, a separate mechanism is firing. Receptors called P2X3 have detected ATP, a chemical that pours out of cells when they are damaged. The heat response appears to shut these receptors down.
The research was spurred on by a chance conversation Dr King had several years ago with colleagues about why hot water bottles seem to relieve pain. Dr King hopes his discovery will lead to new pain-relief drugs that could reduce the need for opiates such as morphine.
He said: “The opiates have a broad spectrum of action, they’re good when you really require pain relief, but it comes at a price. They are very harsh on the body so you only give them as a last resort. We were looking for something that would be less aggressive.” — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
The merciless transformation of arable and habitable land to desert where not even a blade of grass grows drew the focus at a conference from June 19 to 21 in Tunis in which some 400 scientists and policy-makers from the world’s parched regions participated.
The three-day conference titled the “Future of Drylands” was co-organised by the Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).
Highlighting its nagging concern about desertification, UNESCO says in a media release posted on its website: “Desertification directly affects the lives of more than 250 million people and threatens another 1.2 billion in 110 countries.” An estimated 60 million of those affected in sub-Saharan Africa are expected to move towards northern Africa and Europe by 2020, it cautions. — Dawn/IPS News Service
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