
Production of Anti-Cancer Drug, Taxol, Could
Get a Boost By Hank Becker March 30, 1999WASHINGTON, March
30Thanks to new research, taxol, a powerful but expensive anti-cancer
drug, could become more plentiful in the future, Agriculture Secretary Dan
Glickman said today. USDA researchers have developed a new
process for producing taxol from lab-cultured cells of its increasingly scarce
natural source, the yew tree. The new process is 100 times more productive than
the original process for deriving taxol, which was patented by USDA in 1991. By learning more about plants, we are helping to speed production and
increase availability of a medicine vital to human health, said Glickman.
Taxol is a potent chemotherapy drug for breast, ovarian, lung and other
cancers. About 6,700 pounds of bark from rare yew trees are needed to produce a
pound of the taxol drug. Now, USDA plant physiologist Donna Gibson and her
research colleagues have invented a new process for using lab-cultured yew
cells to produce the drug. USDA has applied for patent protection on the new process for producing
taxol. If use of this new source of taxol is approved by the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration and proves
medically effective, far less yew tree bark would be required as a source for
the drug. Anti-cancer drugs based on the process could be available within a
few years. The new process was invented by Gibson, of USDAs Agricultural Research
Service Plant, Soil, and
Nutrition Research Laboratory in Ithaca, N.Y.; Raymond E. B. Ketchum at
Washington State University, Pullman; and
Michael L. Shuler at the
Cornell Research
Foundation, Inc., in Ithaca. Gibson and colleagues were among the first
scientists to show that taxol can be produced in yew cell cultures. An article on the research appears in the April issue of the ARS monthly
magazine Agricultural
Research and is available on the World Wide Web at: http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/apr99/taxol0499.htm Scientific contact: Donna M. Gibson, Plant Protection Research Unit,
U.S. Plant, Soil and Nutrition Research Laboratory,
Agricultural Research Service, USDA,
Ithaca, N.Y., phone (607) 255-2359, dmg6@
cornell.edu. Story contacts Plant Protection Research Donna M Gibson U.S. Department of Agriculture | |