Morphine, a painkiller commonly used in hospitals, may be produced just like home-brewed beer.
In a study published in Nature Chemical Biology, scientists used a chemical method of converting sugar to morphine by using genetically-modified yeast. Microscopic yeast is also used to turn sugar into beer, when people make the beverage in their own homes.
Using botanical DNA found in opium for instance, chemists were able to try the complicated process of converting sugar to morphine. This resulted in a substance that can already be brewed to the medicine using the same equipment households use to make beer.
The process requires about 300 liters of genetically-modified yeast to produce a 30mg dose of morphine.
"What you really want to do from a fermentation perspective is to be able to feed the yeast glucose, which is a cheap sugar source, and have the yeast do all the chemical steps required downstream to make your target therapeutic drug," said one of the researchers, Dr. John Dueber.
Dueber is a bioengineer at the University of California, Berkeley, where the study was conducted. "It's now a matter of linking (the steps) together and scaling up the process," he added.
Because of this breakthrough, scientists are now interested in studying the process further for other pain relievers, medicines and drugs used in hospitals. While it may not be easy, according to Dueber, it certainly is possible.
On the other hand, however, concerns about illegal production by drug cartels and potential drug abuse and addiction are surfacing, especially when the wrong kind of people get figure out how to do these methods.
"Making opioids that can be used in an illegal sense makes this an important story," according to Professor Paul Freemont of the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation at Imperial College in London.
Due to this threat, experts advise a tight control over the production of these genetically modified organisms to avoid creating homemade drugs and illegal substances.
