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New research led by University of New Brunswick chemists could revolutionize the way some drugs are manufactured.
The UNB researchers, along with researchers at Zhejiang and Westlake universities in China, have discovered how some plants are able to manufacture drugs used to treat cancer.
Now that it’s known how plants manufacture the drug, Yang Qu, an associate professor of chemistry at UNB, who led the UNB research team, said it should be possible to create the drug in the lab much faster.
“We discovered that the efficiency has so much improved, in fact, that we could produce this drug nearly 1,000 times higher than previously reported values,” Qu said.
The research is the subject of an article this month in the academic magazine Science.
Difficult to manufacture
The specific drug the researchers looked into is called vinblastine, which is used to treat several kinds of cancer, including bladder, brain and testicular cancer.
But the drug is notoriously difficult to manufacture.
It’s only produced in one species of plant, the Madagascar periwinkle, a flowering plant.
Qu said while the plant is the only producer of the drug, it doesn’t produce much of it.
“It takes 100 kilograms of the dry plant material to get one gram of vinblastine.” Qu said. “So the plant is very inefficient in producing it.”
The drug is also complex, which makes producing it by chemical synthesis difficult and costly, he said.
Scaffold proteins
But the researchers have discovered how the Madagascar periwinkle produces the drug.
Usually drugs in plants are created when enzymes are a catalyst for a chemical reaction.
But the Madagascar periwinkle uses what’s called a “scaffold protein” to bring together the components that make the drug.
Qu said scaffold proteins work in much the same way as scaffolds on a construction site.
“The workers are better arranged because of this scaffold protein. Therefore the construction is a lot more efficient and much quicker.”
Now that researchers know this, Qu said, they can put this particular scaffold protein into the plant’s microbial system, which improves the efficiency of the process.
The medical advance is important, although it hasn’t yet led to quicker production of the drug.
But Qu said it’s made industrial production of the drug “closer than ever to reality.”
“I think in the near future we should be able to see some real world application out of this research,” Qu said.
