Quicker, Cheaper And Better Production Of Vaccines And Medicines Using Fungus: Opportunities In A ВЈ2,000 Million Market For Scottish Science Team

A UK team has identified some major problems which prevent specialist pharmaceutical companies from using simple fungal cultures to make modern therapeutic drugs in huge quantities in fermenters, instead of using animal, plant or insect cells, scientists heard today (Tuesday 27 March 2007) at the Society for General Microbiology's 160th Meeting at the University of Manchester, UK, which will run from 26 29 March 2007.


Vaccines for diseases like bird flu or hepatitis, life saving human hormones like insulin, and specialist protein based medicines are now part of a two thousand million pound market (ВЈ2,000,000,000) worldwide.


Researchers are trying to respond rapidly to new threats, previously untreatable diseases and the need for specific vaccines by making industrial quantities of therapeutic protein as potential medicines. To make sufficient quantities the scientists use bioreactors filled with modified yeasts, bacteria and other microbes such as the Aspergillus fungus.


"We chose the filamentous fungus Aspergillus niger, since other Aspergillus species have already been successfully modified to make useful medicines. Our version makes a lysozyme, an important cell defence component which kills invading bacteria", says Qiang Li, from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK. "Although the fungus will helpfully make the proteins we want in economic quantities, because the system is alive, it also makes unwanted by-products such as protein digesting enzymes which can damage or contaminate the valuable medicines we need".


Efforts to use this filamentous fungus to produce pure and industrial quantities of medicines commercially have always run into this problem of contamination. The Aspergillus types of fungus (there are over 180) often grow in damp, carbon-rich and oxygen-rich conditions such as on the surface of your compost heap, or on slices of bread. The scientists have discovered that by providing plenty of carbon to feed the fungus, and lowering the temperature, they can minimise or even prevent the damage from unwanted by-products.


The Scottish team also discovered that the contaminants, the protein digesting enzymes, are unaffected by oxygen, but the fungus itself can be encouraged to make more of the valuable lysozyme by oxygenating the growing culture, speeding up the fungal metabolism, and drug production times.


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