GM-free Scotland

News | January '10 | Magnifection

Image of a gloved hand holding a syringeAs of 2009, the EU has guidelines in place for dealing with applications to grow pharm-crops in Europe. But is it wise to grow them at all?

Back in 2004, Dow AgroSciences predicted that biopharmaceutical drugs and chemicals would become worth $200 billion. One leader in the field of biopharmaceuticals, Prodigene, calculated that by the end of the decade, 10% of the corn produced in the US would be for drugs. As one US doctor said “imagine being able to harvest enough globulin (an anti-arthritis drug) for the whole world in all of fifty acres?”

Biopharmaceuticals will come from crops genetically transformed to generate drugs or chemicals within their tissues. Two major staple food crops, maize and rice, are amongst the favourites. Trials of pharm crops are being grown all over the world by farmers willing to lease their land for experiments.

The materials which biopharming can produce seem to include just about any commercially useful organic chemical, such as hormones, blood coagulants, vaccines for humans and livestock, antibodies, contraceptives and industrial enzymes. None of these would be good for your health if you, or livestock which become your food, ate them by accident. Some could prove fatal.

Serious questions were being asked back in 2004 about whether pharm crops could be kept segregated, or whether they would lead to a biological Chernobyl. Past lessons from engineered genes which have ended up in our food due to pollen spread or seed mixing do not inspire confidence: Starlink maize, known to be potentially allergenic to humans, entered US food in 2000; Prodigene's maize plus drugs for pigs nearly arrived on US human plates in 2002; Triffid flax, supposedly destroyed in 2001, turned up in 34 countries all over the world during 2009; Bayer's Liberty Link rice, which was rushed through testing in 2005 trying to compete with Monsanto (and then abandoned) was found contaminating more than 30% of US rice years later.

The effects of uncontained chemical-generating plants on soil microbial life and wildlife also raise major concerns.

So far, biological drugs have been produced mainly from fermenting GM micro-organisms. The Institute of Science in Society reported in 2009 that 250 such biologicals, had been approved by the US and EU regulators and were on the market. Ten of these are among the world's top-selling 'block-buster' drugs, valued at up to $3.2 billion in sales.

However, there is a dark side to such biologically-derived wonder-drugs. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 24% of biologicals in the US and EU have prompted safety regulatory action, significantly more than newly introduced synthetic chemicals drugs. While new chemical drugs have an 8.5% chance of safety warnings within ten years of approval, this rises to 17% for biologicals. In 2005, one biological drug for multiple sclerosis was suspended following the death of two patients, and after a clinical trial of an experimental biological in 2006, all six volunteers face a life-time of cancers and autoimmune disease due to a violent immune system reaction to the drug.

Open-field growing of biopharm crops seems downright dangerous to the public and the environment. However, an alternative GM technology, 'magnifection' is on the horizon which alters the safety concerns considerably.

Magnifection involves creating a plant virus with the required DNA and using this to genetically transform a common soil bacterium, Agrobacterium, which is a plant pathogen. The Agrobacterium is then used to infect mature crop plants which end up with multiple copies of the artificial DNA throughout their tissue.

The result is a crop which generates a huge quantity of the biological drug (up to 80% of the total plant protein) in a very short space of time after which the rate declines and the plant can be harvested. The process can generate several milligrams of a drug in only 3-4 weeks, and as much as 100 kilograms in under a year. A one-hectare greenhouse can produce the same amount of transgenic protein as 1000 hectares using previous viral vector systems. The favoured plant for magnifection is tobacco, which is not a food plant.

Is magnifection safer, or just different?

Neither viruses nor bacteria are likely to be containable in a green house. Agrobacterium is capable of genetically transforming human cells, and biologicals will regularly be produced using bacteria containing human genes: this is known to increase the chances of gene transfer into human recipient cells.

The biopharm advocates are busy rolling out a blanket of public sedation just in case we notice the dangers. We are assured that a pharmaceutical product from a plant is “not even a new concept, if we take into account that we've used medicinal plants for centuries” and there's nothing unusual about breeding human proteins in the tissues of transgenic plants because “the proteins are the same found in our bodies” and the proteins must be safe because they are “very well defined and have been subject to exhaustive research and clinical trials on humans.”

OUR COMMENT

Do you get the feeling that, now the regulatory machinery is in place in the EU, there's nothing much coming between drug-generating plants and your plate, or, between drug-inducing genes and your cells except common-sense? Remember that figures like $200 billion tend to make commonsense dissolve, unless you focus a little regulatory attention on keeping it in place.

Take note of the sound-bytes coming from biopharm advocates, because you might find yourself running across them with some regularity. Check out COMING CLEAN – News, January 2010.

SOURCES



About Us | Contact Us | 2010 GM-free Scotland