Painkiller Made from Yeast Could Cure Cancer & Chronic Illness Says Study

However, more research is needed to make it commercially cheaper. Smolke believes her team’s discovery could lay the groundwork for new anti-cancer treatment, antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals and “will enable us to make and fairly supply medicine to all who need it”.

The study also shows that it is possible to switch from traditional farm-to-factory route to producing painkillers by using bio-engineered yeast.

Stanford scientists have discovered a new and faster method of turning bioengineered baker’s yeast into opioids.

The engineered yeast was made with a combination of “plant, bacterial, and rodent genes to turn sugar into thebaine, the key opiate precursor to morphine and other powerful painkilling drugs”, said the report.

Biochemical engineer Christina Smolke and colleagues had been working on the problem of synthesizing opioids and other plant-based medicines in the lab for about a decade. When Smolke and her team finally produced hydrocodone from yeast, it was at a rate of 3 micrograms per liter. “We suggest that additional technical challenges, some of which are unknown and likely unrelated to optimized production in large-volume bioreactors, would need to be addressed for engineered yeast to ever realize home-brew biosynthesis of medicinal opiates at meaningful yields”.

Scientists have genetically modified yeast cells to make them churn out painkillers that are normally harvested from opium poppies.

“This is a major milestone”, says Jens Nielsen, a synthetic biologist at Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden.

It can take more than a year to produce a batch of medicine, starting from the farms in Australia, Europe and elsewhere that are licensed to grow opium poppies.

For now, you’d need 4,400 gallons of the bioengineered yeast to get a single dose of pain medication.

One concern of the researchers is that the opioid painkillers are not abused. Adding to this very is this only approved farmsteads may get bigger opioid poppy, because it can be used in the banned development of narcotics. “The demonstration that the engineered strain does not produce thebaine under home brew conditions is reassuring, but cannot be relied on in itself to safeguard against abuse”.

They are also grown for the illegal opium and heroin trades in Afghanistan, Laos, Myanmar, Mexico and elsewhere.

“We want there to be an open deliberative process to bring researchers and policymakers together”, says Smolke. ‘[In May] we predicted that assembling the complete pathway was just around the corner, ‘ says Vincent Martin, a bioengineer from Concordia University in Canada who worked with Dueber. Kenneth A. Oye, a professor of engineering and political science at M.I.T. told The Times he was glad that they hadn’t created morphine because that can more easily be refined into heroin. In the case of opiatemaking yeast, such rules might forbid developing strains to produce illicit drugs, such as heroin, and require scientists to build in genes that prevent the microbes from living outside of a controlled laboratory environment.

That jump in complexity gives a tantalizing taste of just how much is possible with the simple yeast, and there’s no telling what medications might one day benefit from some similarly finagled fungus.