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Students from the University of Ottawa have come up with a brilliant way to essentially make copies of pharmaceutical drugs using plants. Their creation is called “Phytogene,” and they’ve used it to turn a plant related to tobacco into an Ozempic copy machine that you can plant in the ground.
Ozempic, and all the other GLP-1 weight loss medications that help curb appetites, are the “It” pharmaceuticals of the moment. But when there was a recent Ozempic shortage, bioscience majors Victor Boddy and Teagan Thomas tried to find a sustainable, low-cost way to make it at home.
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The idea was simple but sounded so far-fetched that it might as well be a fantasy: find a way to enable people to grow the medications they need at home “free from concerns about insurance, cost, or availability,” as Victor said in a press release.
A Homemade Version of Ozempic?
In essence, they want to create a world where you can get the medications you need by plucking them off of a tree like they were fruit. Or, in this case, drawing it out with a needle.
The process of genetically engineering plants to create pharmaceutical proteins is called biopharming. It’s a fairly new field of study that we’ve covered before that has already shown some promise.
The students say their Phytogene system allows them to take a genetic sequence and easily slip it into the plant’s genome. From the sound of it, the Mr. DNA animated sequence from Jurassic Park seems like a fair description of the process these students have developed.
Once the sequence gaps in the genome have been filled in, the plant then starts creating copies of that genetic sequence—and bingo, Dino DNA, uh, I mean, copies of a GLP-1 medication. There’s still some more testing to be done on that front before they can start jamming it in people. But so far, it all looks quite promising and perhaps even a bit revolutionary.
Time will tell if this lives up to that lofty expectation, but hey, if it does, there may be a day when you can get your Ozempic-like medication from the plants in your garden. Just watch out for those aphids and caterpillars. You’ll know the ones because they’ll be noticeably slimmer than the rest.
