Pain relief is a necessity to many people in all parts of the world. Opiates grown from plants are the present source or opiates but the time that it takes to produce a drug, the costs involved, and the limited legal production makes legal opiate pain relief unavailable to the majority of the world. Christina Smolke, an associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, and colleagues are the first to devise a functional and practical method of producing opiate drugs in hours instead of more than a year.
A large number of medicines originated in plants. The researchers pursued the production of plant-derived medicines from genetically modified yeast and sugars for a decade and have produced the first functional method for producing opiates and other medicines without plants. The production of hydrocodone required the modification of yeast with small fractions of DNA from other plants, bacteria and rats.
The process is not yet ready for commercial production. At present it takes 4,400 gallons of bioengineered yeast to produce a single dose of hydrocodone. The demonstration of the ability to make drugs from yeast and sugar is significant because the plant stocks that are used to make drugs are often endangered. The process is much faster than producing drugs from plants and in time will become commercially viable.
The potential that this process can be used to make another source of illegal opiates is small. The technology and expertise to are extremely complex. The researchers have already begun a dialog with the United States and other governments to prevent the abuse of the new technology. The major benefit of this methodology is the production of a low cost pain relieve that is readily accessible to the 5.5 billion people have little or no access to pain medications.
