Author Archives: ev1

Stanford bioengineers close to brewing painkillers without opium from poppies

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By Tom Abate

Stanford bioengineer Christina Smolke has been on a decade-long quest to genetically alter yeast to "brew" opioid medicines in stainless steel vats, eliminating the need to raise poppies.

For centuries poppy plants have been grown to provide opium, the compound from which morphine and other important medicines such as oxycodone are derived.

Now bioengineers at Stanford have hacked the DNA of yeast and reprogrammed these simple cells to make opioid-based medicines via a sophisticated extension of the basic brewing process that makes beer.

Led by bioengineering Associate Professor Christina Smolke, the Stanford team has already spent a decade genetically engineering yeast cells to reproduce the biochemistry of poppies, with the ultimate goal of producing opium-based medicines, from start to finish, in fermentation vats.

"We are now very close to replicating the entire opioid production process in a way that eliminates the need to grow poppies, allowing us to reliably manufacture essential medicines while mitigating the potential for diversion to illegal use," said Smolke, who outlines her work in the Aug. 24 edition of Nature Chemical Biology.

In the new report, Smolke and her collaborators, Kate Thodey, a postdoctoral scholar in bioengineering, and Stephanie Galanie, a doctoral student in chemistry, detail how they added five genes from two different organisms to yeast cells. Three of these genes came from the poppy itself, and the others from a bacterium that lives on poppy plant stalks.

This multi-species gene mashup was required to turn yeast into cellular factories that replicate two, now separate processes: how nature produces opium in poppies, and then how pharmacologists use chemical processes to further refine opium derivatives into modern opioid drugs such as hydrocodone.

Morphine is one of three principal painkillers derived from opium. As a class they are called opiates. The other two important opiates are codeine, which has been used as a cough remedy, and thebaine, which is further refined by chemical processes to create higher-value therapeutics such as oxycodone and hydrocodone, better known by brand names such as OxyContin and Vicodin, respectively.

Today, legal poppy farming is restricted to a few countries including Australia, France, Hungary, India, Spain and Turkey supervised by the International Narcotics Control Board, which seeks to prevent opiates like morphine, for instance, from being refined into illegal heroin.

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Stanford bioengineers close to brewing painkillers without opium from poppies

Angiocrine Bioscience Licenses New Stem Cell Technology from Weill Cornell Medical College

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NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Angiocrine Bioscience, Inc. announced today that it has licensed the rights to a new technology developed by a team of researchers at the Ansary Stem Cell Institute at Weill Cornell Medical College. The team was led by Dr. Shahin Rafii, director of the Ansary Stem Cell Institute, professor of medicine, genetic medicine and reproductive medicine, and a founder of Angiocrine Bioscience. This scientific advance, reported in the July 2 issue of Nature, could potentially lead to therapies for patients with blood disorders from their own cells.

This technology provides a means of converting a patients own vascular cells, known as endothelial cells, directly into blood stem cells. The endothelial cells are acquiredfrom a biopsied piece of skin and are then educated on a bed of VeraVecTM cells (proprietary to Angiocrine Bioscience) to form multipotent blood cells that are capable of producing red cells that carry oxygen, white cells that provide immunity, and platelets to prevent bleeding. This approach could potentially provide an abundant and safe source of new blood stem cells capable of treating a variety of diseases without the risk of graft versus host disease, a serious, life-threatening complication often associated with stem cell transplants derived from a donor.

"We hope that our method will offer the first safe technology to treat a wide spectrum of serious disorders. The VeraVecTM cells form a nurturing niche for the survival and growth of the reprogrammed blood cells, similar to what happens developmentally during blood production. A particularly important aspect of this study was that the reprogrammed cells engrafted in the bone marrow when implanted into rodents and morphed into the various types of blood cells, said Dr. Rafii.

This technology nicely complements our efforts in applying our VeraVecTM platform to the expansion of umbilical cord blood stem cells, another approach toward making stem cell transplant safer and more broadly available to patients in need, added Geoff Davis, Angiocrines CEO.

About Angioicrine Bioscience, Inc.

Angiocrine Bioscience is a privately held biotech company focused on applying vascular biology to new therapeutic applications. Angiocrines VeraVecTM technology platform is based on endothelial cells that have been genetically modified such that they can be rapidly and durably expanded in culture. Because these cells secrete and display factors essential for stem cell growth and proliferation, they can be used to support cell-based therapies, stem cell transplant, and regenerative medicine applications. VeraVecTM products are currently marketed for research-use only purposes to academic laboratories, medical research institutes, and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

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Angiocrine Bioscience Licenses New Stem Cell Technology from Weill Cornell Medical College