New Discovery in Making Cancer Drug

[Guest guest]

October 1, 2010

" MIT researchers and collaborators from Tufts University have now engineered E.

coli bacteria to produce large quantities of a critical compound that is a

precursor to the cancer drug Taxol, originally isolated from the bark of the

Pacific yew tree. The tree's bacteria can produce 1,000 times more of the

precursor, known as taxadiene, than any other engineered microbial strain.

The technique, described in the Oct. 1 issue of Science, could bring down the

manufacturing costs of Taxol and also help scientists discover potential new

drugs for cancer and other diseases such as hypertension and Alzheimer's, said

Stephanopoulos, who led the team of MIT and Tufts researchers and is one

of the senior authors of the paper.

If you can make Taxol a lot cheaper, that's good, but what really gets people

excited is the prospect of using our platform to discover other therapeutic

compounds in an era of declining new pharmaceutical products and rapidly

escalating costs for drug development, " said Stephanopoulos, the W.H. Dow

Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.

Taxol, also known as paclitaxel, is a powerful cell-division inhibitor commonly

used to treat ovarian, lung and breast cancers. It is also very expensive -

about $10,000 per dose, although the cost of manufacturing that dose is only a

few hundred dollars. (Patients usually receive one dose.)

Two to four Pacific yew trees are required to obtain enough Taxol to treat one

patient, so in the 1990s, bioengineers came up with a way to produce it in the

lab from cultured plant cells, or by extracting key intermediates from plant

material like the needles of the decorative yew. These methods generate enough

material for patients, but do not produce sufficient quantities for synthesizing

variants that may be far more potent for treating cancer and other diseases.

Organic chemists have succeeded in synthesizing Taxol in the lab, but these

methods involve 35 to 50 steps and have a very low yield, so they are not

economical. Also, they follow a different pathway than the plants, which makes

it impossible to produce the pathway intermediates and change them to make new,

potentially more powerful variations.

" By mimicking nature, we can now begin to produce these intermediates that the

plant makes, so people can look at them and see if they have any therapeutic

properties, " said Stephanopoulos. Moreover, they can synthesize variants of

these intermediates that may have therapeutic properties for other diseases. "

(More at website)

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/202761.php

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FYI,

Lottie Duthu