Plants engineered to produce new drugs

London, Nov 4 (ANI): By genetically engineering plants to produce unnatural variants of their usual products, MIT chemists have discovered a new way to expand plants' pharmaceutical repertoire.

The researchers, led by Associate Professor Sarah O'Connor, have added bacterial genes to the periwinkle plant, enabling it to attach halogens such as chlorine or bromine to a class of compounds called alkaloids that the plant normally produces.

Many alkaloids have pharmaceutical properties, and halogens, which are often added to antibiotics and other drugs, can make medicines more effective or last longer in the body.

The team's primary target, an alkaloid called vinblastine, is commonly used to treat cancers such as Hodgkin's lymphoma.

O'Connor sees vinblastine and other drugs made by plants as scaffolds that she can modify in a variety of ways to enhance their effectiveness.

"We're trying to use plant biosynthetic mechanisms to easily make a whole range of different iterations of natural products," she said.

"If you tweak the structure of natural products, very often you get different or improved biological and pharmacological activity," O'Connor added.

The study has been published in the Nov. 3 online edition of Nature. (ANI)