A diverse group of
scientists is unlocking new ways to make antibiotics and drugs to treat cancer,
and these breakthroughs will revolutionize the field of medicine. For example,
at UCLA, researchers are synthesizing new compounds using the bacterium E. coli,
whose fast growth and simple morphology make developing the drugs far easier
than with conventional methods of synthesis. As reported recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,1 the scientists
manipulated the metabolism of the bacterium using enzymes in order to turn it
into a miniature factory for making drugs.
Related breakthroughs
are taking place at academic institutions across the globe, and they promise to
deliver entire new families of drugs. For example, a consortium of researchers
supported by the European Union is engaged in a four-year project to produce
pharmaceuticals using plant cells as drug factories.
By controlling a
plant cell’s metabolism, it can be stimulated to create novel compounds with
therapeutic uses, according to a report from the Technical Research Centre of
Finland.2 Those compounds are so complicated to
manufacture in traditional ways that they are prohibitively expensive. So,
even though they’ve proven useful in treating cancer and malaria, their use,
until now, has been very restricted because of the cost and difficulty of
producing them.
Meanwhile, scientists
at the State University of New York at Buffalo published a report in Nature3 describing a new
method of chemical synthesis using catalysts to produce novel
pharmaceutical compounds with wide-ranging therapeutic uses. This research
promises to improve the discovery of new drugs as well as their production in
large quantities. For example, one gram of a catalyst will typically produce 25
pounds of these new drugs. They are being used to treat a broad spectrum of
diseases, including cancer, depression, and even addictive problems. One of
those new drugs is already in clinical trials.
According to another
recent report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,4 researchers at
Arizona State University are using...
