by Gale Burrus
It sounds like a good idea. Get your daily insulin to control your diabetes in your oatmeal. Receive a vaccination against a deadly disease in your banana with breakfast. Keep third-world country children from dying from diarrhea by giving them medicine in a granola bar.
This process of using biological factories to produce drugs and industrial chemicals is called pharming. Pharming is the genetic engineering of organisms to produce pharmaceuticals.
What’s new?
Historically, we have derived many of our drugs from plants. Examples are aspirin and opiates. And mankind has selectively bred plants and animals for certain characteristics for hundreds of years. So, what’s different with pharming? In pharming, the genetic material, DNA, of two different species is combined. These resulting genetically modified (transgenic) organisms are mostly used to make human proteins that have medicinal value. The first successful drugs produced by genetically engineered organisms were insulin and growth hormone made by altered yeast or bacteria. But bacteria can’t make some drugs, so we milk mammals for them — literally. Cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, rabbits and pigs have already been altered to produce useful proteins and drugs in their milk, eggs or blood. Some drugs produced by these animals are being tested for use in treating blood clots, anemia, hemophilia, emphysema and cystic fibrosis.
But it’s not just drugs being produced through genetic engineering. What about producing a substance five times stronger than steel and twice as strong as Kevlar that could be used for stronger bulletproof vests, stitches and clothes? Such a substance exists now. It’s the dragline silk of spiders. But we would need it in quantity to manufacture items. And it’s hard to run a spider farm; for one thing, they tend to eat each other. The solution? Now you can milk a transgenic goat and remove the silk proteins from its milk that can be spun into a thread with spider-silk properties.
The promise
The existence of cost effective factories that produce affordable industrial and human health products that can improve and save lives.
The problems
One set of problems arises from the methods by which genetically modified organisms are created. One way of introducing genetic material into another organism is by a “gun” approach that may place the genetic material in many places. The organism then may not survive because of the genetic changes, or it may express the new genetics incorrectly. And the unexpected genetic combinations may not express themselves until later generations or only through contamination of non-genetically modified organisms. To increase the chances of placing the genetic material in the right place, often with animals, a retrovirus is used to insert the genetic material from another species into a fertilized egg. A dangerous possibility of using this method is in creating and spreading new viruses when the retrovirus comes into contact with naturally occurring viruses that may be present in the organism. There is also concern with the high number of animal lives lost since only about one percent of injected eggs will result in a live birth containing the transgene, and not all will express it “correctly.” This may result in further harm and suffering to the animals involved.
Another major concern is the possibility of experimental genetically modified (GM) organisms getting into the food supply and being a health risk. This is a major concern with GM food plants as these are being grown in open fields with little regulation and inadequate confinement. And with experimental field-testing, the information about the location and the drug or chemical being produced is proprietary — and usually not made public. There exists the possibility of contamination of not only food crops, but also native plants. The possible environmental consequences of having open “drug factories” aren’t known. And if contamination of our food supply occurs, we probably won’t know it for some time — if ever. There is no regulatory agency that has the ability to test for such contamination of our food.
The Missouri connection
On November 18, 2004, Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville announced it had reached an agreement with Ventria Bioscience to be its anchor company in its vision to create a center of excellence for plant-made pharmaceuticals. It was announced that Ventria Bioscience would be relocating its headquarters, research facilities, processing facilities and field production — 70 percent of its GM rice grown — to Missouri.
Ventria Bioscience is a biopharmaceutical company that has developed a proprietary method of genetic engineering called ExpressTec that uses plants like rice and barley as factories to produce human proteins and peptides that are extracted and made into medical foods or pharmaceuticals. Two proteins that Ventria is producing through transgenic plants are lactoferrin and lysozyme. Both of these proteins are produced in human milk, tears, saliva and nasogastric and bronchial secretions. Along with several different functions, some common functions for both of these proteins include anti-viral and anti-fungal properties. Ventria states that potential products could be used for dietary management of acute diarrhea and treatment of topical infections.
Prior to coming to Missouri, Ventria Biosciences had received approval in March 2004 to grow transgenic rice in its home state of California, but there was great opposition to growing the altered rice in the state. Ventria decided to move to Missouri saying that our state offers more favorable economics and better access to agricultural biotech experts. Part of the favorable economics is that the university and the state are each contributing $10 million toward building a production and teaching complex.
This past spring, Ventria announced it was going to grow 200 acres of transgenic rice to produce the two human proteins in southeastern Missouri. Over 175 farmers signed a petition opposing Ventria’s plans in southeast Missouri where most of our state’s $100 million rice crop is grown. The farmers noted they didn’t believe the claims that the pharmaceutical rice could be contained on its growing plot. They stated that blackbirds and ducks would be carrying the rice seed away from the GM rice fields. Rain and floods are also seen as means by which the transgenic rice seed could be scattered.
Anheuser-Busch, our nation’s largest buyer of rice, announced it would no longer purchase rice grown in Missouri if Ventria was allowed to grow the genetically modified rice in southeastern Missouri. Riceland Foods, Inc., a farmer-owned cooperative and the world’s largest rice miller and marketer, also opposed the planting, asking the U.S. Department of Agriculture to deny Ventria’s request to grow the rice in Cape Girardeau, Scott and Mississippi counties in Missouri. Riceland Foods representatives noted there is no level of acceptance among consumers in the U.S. or abroad for GM rice. The sensitivity of other countries to genetically modified food is important as more than half of Missouri’s rice is sold overseas to the European Union and Caribbean countries. Additional opposition came from the USA Rice Federation and the U.S. Rice Producers Association. Also, U.S. Representative Jo Ann Emerson sent a letter to Governor Matt Blunt stating “…I must oppose the production of GM (genetically modified) rice in Southeast Missouri in crop year 2005.”
In April, Anheuser-Busch dropped its opposition to Ventria’s planting GM rice in Missouri under an agreement that Ventria would not grow GM rice within 120 miles of commercial rice crops. However, since it was late into the growing season by the time Ventria could go forward, it ended up planting 70 acres of GM rice in North Carolina this summer.
The current and future situation — and you
Currently Ventria has four test plots of rice growing in northwest Missouri, near Watson. Rural economics is one of the main reasons farmers are trying the transgenic rice. Ventria will pay farmers more than double what they make on their most profitable crop. It will also pay Northwest Missouri State University $500 an acre for crops grown on university property. Besides Missouri and North Carolina, Ventria is looking for a Southern Hemisphere location in which to grow GM rice year around.
Once Ventria decides where it will plant GM rice in Missouri on a commercial scale, it will have to apply for a permit from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a process that usually takes two to three months. Want to take action? Speak up and tell the U.S. Department of Agriculture what you think of genetically modified rice being grown in Missouri.