French fries that work like Ozempic: The push to make medicine you can eat

The Age

3 days ago

'It's about 100 or so times more potent than gabapentin, which is the clinically used drug for neuropathic pain,' Craik, from UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience, said. His team then genetically tweaked mustard plants to produce the venom-derived cyclotide.
'Those seeds are tiny, the size of a pinhead, so they're never going to be enough to be therapeutic. But we'd be interested in putting it into something bigger … peanuts or chickpeas.'
Craik's team has also crafted cherry tomatoes that contain a cyclopeptide going through clinical trials in Sweden as an experimental treatment for multiple sclerosis symptoms.
It's very hard for a new drug to make it through the clinical trial process, and many promising candidates falter. But if the peptide proves effective, Craik can imagine people with multiple sclerosis eating a Greek salad or sipping a Bloody Mary made with the tomatoes and feeling their symptoms ease.
The ARC grant and partnership will also explore a cholesterol-reducing drug that could be spliced into vegetables, as well as a peptide that targets an appetite receptor and induces fullness. Craik said it could serve as an alternative to Ozempic.
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'My dream would be to put that into potatoes so that you could have your McDonald's French fries and not worry about obesity.'
These products, at this stage, are hypothetical. One of the research goals is to have a food product ready for trials by the end of the three-year grant.
It's also unclear which regulatory jurisdiction the products would fall under. Whether they're considered nutraceuticals, medicines, or genetically modified foods will dictate which bodies need to be involved before they're grown and sold commercially, such as the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator.
'We're hoping, to start with, that they will fall under a nutraceutical, where it's a very light dose, and you'd have to eat tonnes of product to get anywhere dangerous,' said Phyllome chief executive Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin.
Phyllome grows packaged vegetables such as spinach and rocket in automated 'plant factories'. Robots whizz around the indoor vertical farm in inner Sydney's Alexandria and take a photo of plants every hour, analysing the crops with AI, and harvest them when they're ready.
'In essence, our entire farm here has zero human interaction, from sowing through to picking bags off the back of a packager,' Eckersley-Maslin said. 'Everything in the middle is automated by robots.'
The partnership will first focus on growing peptides aimed at pain relief, cholesterol management and appetite suppression in the native tobacco plant Nicotiana benthamiana.
The tobacco plants can't be eaten, but work as natural 'bio-factories' to produce the target peptides, which can be extracted from the plant's leaves.
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The plants were discovered near Wolf Creek in Western Australia, of Hollywood horror fame, and proved useful because they have weak immune systems, which makes it easier to insert the genes that code for the production of cyclotides.
The next stage of the research will work on making the same genetic tweaks in plants that produce food.
Said Craik: 'It's sort of, if you like, going back 3000 years to Hippocrates, who said, 'Let food be thy medicine'.'