The science of “pharming” involves production of medicines from genetically altered plants. It’s an emerging area, and Ireland has a lot to gain by supporting this research, which offers a cheap, safe, reliable method of producing drugs in a controlled way.

At the moment, there are tight restrictions on anyone growing genetically modified plants in Ireland. When people think of GM crops, they usually think of crops that are grown for food, such as the sugar beet that was given permission by the Environmental Protection Agency in the late 1990s.

But there is another side to the GM story — the growing of crops for medicines. These are altered in order to become little factories that can produce a whole range of drugs, antibodies, vaccines and desirable proteins. The big difference between the growing of GM food crops and GM medicine crops is that scientists believe the latter is a safer and more profitable enterprise. The medicine crops would not be grown in the open, where the risk of cross-contamination with other non-GM crops is a factor. They would be grown in highly controlled conditions in a glasshouse. Medicine crops do not need a large amount of area — a lot can be achieved with a small number of plants.

This is going to become an increasingly important way of producing medicines in the future, but for the moment Irish researchers involved in this area do not consider it worthwhile to apply for a licence. The overall antipathy towards GM prompts them to seek collaborators overseas, where restrictions are less stringent.

If it was made easier to grow medicine crops, Ireland could become a hub for a cheap and reliable method of drug production. That would catch the attention of big pharma companies here, and give them a reason to stay. The potential is staggering. Brian Hooker, of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in America, a leading researcher in this field, has calculated that the world’s entire requirement of recombinant factor 8 — a blood-clotting protein vital for haemophiliacs — could be met by just one hectare of GM tobacco plants. Large tobacco plants are typically used to grow medicines, and as no native tobacco plants grow in Ireland, there would be no risk of GM versions cross-fertilising others.

GM tobacco plants would help reduce the high cost of factor 8, currently €5,000 per gram. The price of other expensive medicines could be reduced, too, and drugs for TB, malaria and other killers would be brought within reach of the poorest people on the planet.

The science behind “pharming” is simple enough. In the early 1990s, scientists found a way to do “nuclear transfer”. That meant inserting a gene that carries an instruction to produce a useful protein. This worked, but the yield of protein was low, and that was a problem in terms of commercial viability.

A way around this has now been found with a technique known as chloroplast transfer. Chloroplasts are tiny structures inside a plant cell that make it green, and where energy is generated through photosynthesis. There are thousands of chloroplasts in a cell — as opposed to the one nucleus used in the previous method — and scientists have found a way to alter all of them genetically to produce the medicine of choice.

This process of increasing medicine production using chloroplast is called amplification, and it has made this technology commercially viable, making it realistic to think in terms of a future “pharming” industry. The increased yields can be spectacular, with up to 45% of the total protein in plant cells being the product of the foreign gene inserted. Even if yield is 2%, that’s still a lot of product.

A handful of scientists in Ireland are working on “pharming”. One is Phil Dix at NUI Maynooth, who is working on developing one part of an HIV vaccine. Dix’s laboratory is one of the few in the world that has expertise in chloroplast transformation. He said: “I think most people don’t see it being done on a field scale. It’s always going to be in contained glasshouses. If each plant produces tens of thousands of euros’ worth of product, you don’t need very many. You can potentially produce a large proportion of the world’s requirement of one of these [medical] products in a small area.”

We should support the work of people like Dr Dix and provide the funding and encouragement for other scientists to also engage in this important field.

Sean Duke is joint editor of Science Spin, a popular science magazine. www.sciencespin.com

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