Science and Mutant Anti-Diabetes Tobacco Plants
Posted: Wednesday, April 15, 2009
by Garson Smart
CigarFox
Now, please don't misread that headline. Your well-stocked humidor is, to put it mildly, no help to you in reducing your risk of diabetes. (Nor is red meat full of fiber and vitamin C, or a glass of fine stout good for concentration.) And you won't be able to buy diabetes-fighting cigars through your favorite online cigar retailer any time soon.
To get specific, a study led by researchers at the University of Verona (yes, that's the same Italian city that Shakespeare used as the setting for Romeo and Juliet) has resulted in the growth of a tobacco plant full of interleukin-10. This protein reduces inflammation, and thus may be useful to type-1 diabetes sufferers, as well as victims of other diseases that strike the autoimmune system.
But wait. Since scientists can presumably already synthesize interleukin-10 (and all sorts of other things) in their test tubes, why on earth are they growing tobacco plants full of the stuff?
The answer to this question has to do with molecular farming, a new strategy for drug production that may promise to cut drug-company costs. And with the world economy in the shape it's in, cost-reduction strategies are looking good to any company with its eye on the bottom line--and that means more research dollars for scientists who pursue this interesting line of inquiry.
The fact is, complex proteins are expensive to make in a lab. It costs money to fund the round-the-clock energy required to keep lab conditions under control, to pay for the stainless-steel fermenters in which lab-synthesized proteins must be grown, et cetera. After all, imagine that you were trying to produce, in your home, a common nutrient, vitamin, or mineral--say, the chemical lycopene, which makes tomatoes so uniquely healthy. (Waiter, more ketchup, please!) Would it be cheaper to maintain a round-the-clock lab setup in your garage, or just grow a tomato plant in your yard? Nature maintains its own lab, which evolved over millions of years to produce optimal conditions for every plant. Drug companies stand to save millions, then, if they can whip together a genetically modified mutant plant that will, once synthesized, grow naturally in the fields, requiring nothing more than sunlight, water, and a bit of loving care (corporate mega-farm style). Even if the resulting plants are grown in a greenhouse, it's still infinitely cheaper than growing proteins in a laboratory.
But why tobacco? Well, the plant beloved of cigar smokers is also, it turns out, a big favorite with gene scientists. Of all the commonly-found plants, it's the one that's easiest to manipulate genetically, and, when a desired mutation is created in one plant, it's also easy to regrow a new tobacco plant from a single cell of the first one. For genetic manipulators looking to give evolution a helping hand, those are pretty convenient features. Tobacco has thus played an essential role in crop science, gene science and related fields since their modern inception.
Speaking of tobacco, Philip Morris, among others, is cheering on these research results. The company, perhaps sensing that genetically-modified medical plants could be a profitable new sideline for the boy who already has everything, plans to help support a conference on the topic this June in Verona.
But don't look forward to seeing special, disease-fighting smokes made from anti-diabetes tobacco plants on sale from your favorite cigar retailer anytime soon. First of all, the Verona team's results are only tentative. The next step will reportedly be experiments to see if consuming the plant helps reduce autoimmune disease symptoms in mice. (Who knew that mice got autoimmune diseases?) If those results look good, trials with humans are still a ways down the road. Besides that, genetically modified organisms are always patented, so any use of this special disease-fighting tobacco plant will be limited to corporations contracting with the companies that have funded this research and (thus) secured its patent. It is this feature of genetically-modified food that has resulted in some of the controversy you may remember reading about: genetically-modified seeds, for example, have blown into the fields of surrounding farms, leading to the inadvertent, accidental growth of patented (and often inedible) organisms by nearby farmers. If GMOs become widespread, they could become a potent weapon against small farmers, who would lack the manpower to ensure that wind-blown GMO seeds haven't contaminated their own fields, and would thus be left vulnerable to lawsuits.
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