Cancer Drug To Be Based On Common Laboratory Plant

There is a new way of creating a common cancer drug, and it is available only in a rare and endangered plant from a common lab plant, say scientists at Stanford University, according to Science Daily.

This potent chemotherapy drug harvested a chemical through genetic engineering on the common plant. This was the Himalayan mayapple (Podophyllum hexandrum), a common laboratory plant that created a precursor to etoposide, a commonly available cancer-fighting drug, according to Phys.org.

"People have been grinding up plants to find new chemicals and testing their activity for a really long time," said Elizabeth Sattely, assistant professor of chemical engineering at Stanford. "What was striking to us is that with a lot of the plant natural products currently used as drugs, we have to grow the plant, then isolate the compound, and that's what goes into humans."

This discovery would help to give pharmaceutical companies a lot of the cancer-fighting drug and open the way for research to improve its effectiveness, according to Science Now.

"A big promise of synthetic biology is to be able to engineer pathways that occur in nature, but if we don't know what the proteins are, then we can't even start on that endeavor," said Sattely. "My interests are really identifying new molecules and pathways from plants that are important for human health," according to hngn.