Inexpensive Cancer drug

Hope for inexpensive Cancer drug

An Indian scientist, Parayil, a PhD from Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam and a post doctoral associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has tinkered with the digestive system and sewage bacterium to produce in abundance a chemical compound that promises an inexpensive route to a blockbuster cancer drug. He has helped coax E-coli bacteria to make texadiene, a precursor compound for paclitaxel, a drug widely used to treat breast, lung and ovarian cancers.

Paclitaxel was first isolated in the 1970s from the bark of the Pacific yew tree, but early production methods required cutting down two to four fully grown trees to extract enough of the drug to treat a single patient.

Recent production methods involve harvesting the drug from plant cells grown in the laboratory, but even this process yields small quantities, and the drug is still expensive-about US$10.000per dose in the US.

Parayil has explained that "this bacteria produces 1000 times more of this precursor than any other engineered microbe". He first engineered E-coli to eliminate a bottleneck that was interfering with the synthesis of taxadiene, and then gave the bacteria two genes from the Pacific yew tree to get them to produce copious amounts of taxadiene.

Scientists have welcomed this research as this will help production of Paclitaxel lot more economical.