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Published online 10 August 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1031
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Alkaloids produced by genetically engineered yeast
Ready access to complex compounds will allow pharmacological studies of potential painkillers.
Yeast cells have been turned into biological factories that manufacture a range of alkaloids — naturally occurring chemical compounds such as morphine that contain nitrogen atoms and that often have useful pharmaceutical properties. The work opens the way to commercially producing previously unobtainable and potentially valuable alkaloids.
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Great!!! I appreciate the hard work of Hawkins and Smolke team. If plant secondary metabolites can be produced by the microbes, then we can save the forest around us and also it can be produced in required quantities with out any difficulty. More work in this direction will fulfill the dreams of lots of poor patients who are waiting out there to get the drugs at affordable rates.
Currently, the problem (at least with the alkaloids sythesized--those used as painkillers) isn't so much the cost. Morphine is plentiful in the opium poppy, and most morphine is used industrially to sythesize codeine. More of the problem lies on the fact that 6 countries consume 79% of the world's morphine. The reason is that many countries do not use morphine even to relieve pain in the dying. While this important research for the general applications it can have, it needs to be developed beyond the synthesis of BIAs.
While I greatly applaud the efforts of Hawkins and Smolke, et al., I am left wondering just how many minutes will it take for someone to steal an aliquot of this yeast strain and disseminate it throughout the planet, thus, creating a virtually unlimited source of morphine, a drug which is only one exceedingly simple chemical step removed from heroin.
This is an idea that has been around for quite some time now and I am excited to see progress. I remember reading an article almost 10 years ago that talked about the possibility of engineering yeast to produce THC for use by cancer patients, AIDS patients, etc.