Ebola puts focus on drugs made in tobacco plants

[humble3d]

Ebola puts focus on drugs made in tobacco plants

MEDIA & MORE VIA THE LINK(S) BELOW...

NEW YORK (AP) — It's an eye-catching angle in the story of an experimental treatment for Ebola: The drug comes from tobacco plants that were turned into living pharmaceutical factories.

Using plants this way — sometimes called "pharming" — can produce complex and valuable proteins for medicines. That approach, studied for about 20 years, hasn't caught on widely in the pharmaceutical industry.

But some companies and academic labs are pursuing it to create medicines and vaccines against such targets as HIV, cancer, the deadly Marburg virus and norovirus, known for causing outbreaks of stomach bug on cruise ships, as well as Ebola.

While most of the work in this area uses a tobacco plant, it's just a relative of the plant used to make cigarettes.

"It's definitely not something you smoke," said Jean-Luc Martre, a spokesman for Medicago, a Canadian company that's testing flu vaccines made with tobacco plants.

Medicago has a new production facility in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Once approved by federal authorities, it's expected to be able to make 30 million doses of seasonal flu vaccine a year, or 120 million vaccine doses to fight a major outbreak of "pandemic" flu if the government requests it.

Scientists favor tobacco plants because they grow quickly and their biology is well understood, said Ben Locwin, a pharmaceutical biotech consultant in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who is considered an expert on plant-produced medicines by the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists.

The North Carolina operation can handle as many as 90,000 plants. Under the whir of fans, rows of young seedlings grow for about a month, until they are about a foot tall. Then they are taken by robots to another section of the facility, turned upside down and dipped in a tank to be "infiltrated" with whatever proteins they wish to grow.

There are a number of Ebola treatments and vaccine in development, and one comes from tobacco plants grown in specialized greenhouses at another operation, Kentucky BioProcessing, in Owensboro, Kentucky.

That experimental treatment, called ZMapp, uses proteins called antibodies, and is designed to inactivate the Ebola virus and help the body kill infected cells. It hasn't been tested in people but had shown promise in animal tests, so it was tried in three people sickened by Ebola in West Africa — two U.S. aid workers and a Spanish missionary priest, who later died.

The last few doses available are in Liberia. Kentucky BioProcessing, which produces it for the San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, said it would take several months to make more, but it is working to increase production.

In general, the idea behind pharming is to slip the genetic blueprints for a particular protein into a plant and let the plant's protein-making machinery go to work. Then the protein can be extracted from plant tissues. While tobacco plants are a mainstay of such work, proteins also have been produced in other plants, such as safflower and potato.

In fact, the only medicine made this way that the federal government has approved for general use in people is made in a laboratory from cells of carrot plants. It treats a genetic illness called Gaucher's disease. The drug was approved in 2012 by the Food and Drug Administration.

A plant-made vaccine for a chicken disease gained approval from the Department of Agriculture in 2006 but was never brought to market. Another plant-produced product to fight germs that cause tooth decay has been approved for use in Europe.

The lack of any stronger track record for approved drugs in the United States is a key reason why the plant-based technology hasn't been embraced more fully, Locwin said. That's despite the fact that it offers benefits like lower cost than the standard approach of using vats of cells from mammals to churn out complex proteins, Locwin said.

Some companies use cells from bacteria instead, but they can't always produce the complicated proteins that drug companies need, he said. The plant-based approach "has a tremendous amount of promise, but it doesn't yet have the FDA blessing across the board to be able to say this is successful" and a proven way to get a drug to market, he said.

And it would cost companies money to change over to the new technology, he said.

Plant-based drugs have attracted the attention and funding of the federal government, however, as a fast and cheap approach to make a lot of vaccine material in case of terrorist attacks, said Daniel Tuse (pronounced too-SAY'), a consultant and managing director of Intrusept Biomedicine, which also works with tobacco plants in Owensboro.

If a new germ appears, genetic material from it can be quickly inserted into plants, and large numbers of the plants can churn out supplies of material for vaccines or treatments, he said.

The plant-based experimental Ebola treatment was developed with government support.

Ebola Epidemic Most Likely Much Larger Than Reported, W.H.O.

GENEVA — West Africa’s deadly Ebola epidemic is probably much worse than the world realizes, with health centers on the front lines warning that the actual numbers of deaths and illnesses are significantly higher than the official estimates, the World Health Organization said.

So far, 2,127 cases of the disease and 1,145 deaths have been reported in four nations — Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone — the W.H.O announced Friday. But the organization has also warned that the actual number is almost certainly higher, perhaps by a very considerable margin.

“Staff at the outbreak sites see evidence that the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak,” the group said in a statement on Thursday.

The epidemic is still growing faster than efforts to keep up with it, and it will take months before governments and health workers in the region can get the upper hand, Joanne Liu, the president of Doctors Without Borders, said on Friday, calling conditions on the ground “like a war.”

Questions and answers on the scale of the outbreak and the science of the Ebola virus.

The situation “is moving faster and deteriorating faster than we can respond,” Dr. Liu told reporters in Geneva after returning a day earlier from a tour of the affected nations.

The epidemic’s front line “is moving, it’s advancing, but we have no clue how it’s going to go around,” Dr. Liu said. “Over the next six months we should get the upper hand on the epidemic,” she added, but this was only a “gut feeling” and it would happen only if sufficient resources were put in place.

Many deaths have occurred within local communities, not at health centers, and the known deaths are “likely the tip of the iceberg,” Dr. Liu said. “We are still having increasing numbers in most of the sites where we work.”

The W.H.O. announced last week that the Ebola epidemic constituted a public health emergency, in a bid to galvanize local and international action. But it has also emphasized that the risk of the epidemic spreading abroad is extremely low.

As countries around the world stepped up precautions for preventing the spread of the disease, the International Olympic Committee announced on Friday that athletes from the countries affected by the Ebola outbreak who are attending the Youth Olympic Games in the Chinese city of Nanjing would not be allowed to compete in contact sports or in the swimming pool.

Dr. Frederick Murphy was the first person to photograph and study Ebola up close in 1976. He reflects on disease he has come to know over the last 38 years. Jeffery DelViscio

In addition to this step, which would affect three athletes, it said team members from the affected countries would be subject to regular temperature checks and physical assessments throughout the games.

In its statement on Thursday, the W.H.O. said it was coordinating “a massive scaling up” in support from governments, disease control agencies and other organizations. Margaret Chan, the organization’s director general, met ambassadors in Geneva on Thursday to identify the most urgent needs and seek matching responses, it reported.

Dr. Liu cautioned that “we haven’t turned any corner yet” and that most of the international response was still at the level of promises.

Action to combat the epidemic was at different levels in each of the affected countries, Dr. Liu noted, singling out Liberia as a priority for urgent international attention as it strives to contain the spread of the disease in the capital, Monrovia, a city of 1.3 million people, where one overstretched health care center was providing care for Ebola patients.

“If we don’t stabilize Liberia, we will never stabilize the whole region,” Dr. Liu warned.

The United Nations reported that the World Food Programme was delivering food to more than one million people “locked down” in the quarantine zones where the borders of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone intersect, but Dr. Liu was doubtful about the effectiveness of checkpoints intended to restrict people’s movements.

“I’ve seen it: People are fleeing, people are running around,” she said, describing a checkpoint she had passed where people were walking around it. The local population was not fully supportive and without that, she said, it would be difficult to make the measure effective.

Next in Africa
Health Officials Try to Quell Fear of Ebola Spreading by Air Travel

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/16/world/africa/ebola-epidemic-who-health-crisis-west-africa.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ebola-puts-focus-drugs-made-tobacco-plants

[OrioNeXus]

tobacco companies can prosper via these drugs :rolleyes:

[darko999]

tobacco companies can prosper via these drugs :rolleyes:

Or they can just keep selling cancer and earn tons of billion of dollars.