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Program Description > Internet Forums > Symposia/Roundtable Proposals > Technical Paper & Poster Abstracts > Registration > Housing & Transportation |
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Program Description > Internet Forums > Symposia/Roundtable Proposals > Technical Paper & Poster Abstracts > Registration > Housing & Transportation |
A.I. Robertson, CEO, Agri-Biotech (Pvt) Ltd
and
Lecturer in Crop Science
University of Zimbabwe
When I first read of Prof Arntzen putting a Hepatitis B surface antigen gene into potatoes I had a quiet chuckle. I am a Scottish Zimbabwean and a potato eater myself, but who eats potatoes raw? It’s just a dream! Then when I heard he had solved that problem by putting the gene into banana, I had visions of all my students wending their way to their ‘home’ villages to plant groves of HepB vaccine bananas and grateful smiling Mums feeding their bouncing babies on HepB banana mush. But obviously the medical chaps would have something to say about dosage and safety and do we really want to protect our neighborhood baboons and rhesus monkeys from Hepatitis?
Nevertheless, greatly daring I wrote Charles Arntzen saying I would value being allowed to play a part if he was aiming to help with plant vaccines for use in South America, could I possibly use his constructs in the service of Africa? We have a good tissue culture and molecular lab and, given the constructs, we could follow protocols and do the job. Not surprisingly a rather cautious reply from Cornell said “Early days, and, basically, we are not sure who you are?” Fair enough, but a common experience in the Third World. So I encouraged my lads to try to put human insulin into tobacco a smallish protein and our main export crop which as we all now know has the capacity to kill rather than cure. Can we not, I asked of them, turn our foreign exchange earning weed into a Continent wide health provider at low cost?
Now to my pleasure Arntzen is outlining the route to the goal of cheap, effective, safe medical necessities, especially vaccines, becoming available to all, and better still, they might be produced and validated in the developing countries themselves! For this concept it seems to me that Arntzen deserves every support, including financial, to press on towards that goal/vision/dream. He has clearly consulted widely across relevant disciplines and put his finger on many sensitive points and seems to be forging an answer on each issue. From a Developing World perspective, which issues are these?
Firstly, for the Third World, low cost is critical in Zimbabwe we have yet to complete our vaccination of the whole population against Hepatitis B and the stumbling block was cost of vaccine which is currently available but too expensive for covering every person at risk. If production and quality control and clinical trials are shifted to a developing country the cost falls dramatically: this is quite apart from the fact that production in plants is far cheaper in the North than in mammalian cultures or fermentation units. In Zimbabwe the cost of funding a Phd programme is about one tenth of the same PhD in the North.
As to field or greenhouse production, which is one of the next needed steps, a hectare of potatoes costs 2,400 US$ an acre in Washington USA (Brown, USDA, seminar discussion p116, XXVIth World Horticultural Congress, Toronto, August, 2002). The same field and yield in Zimbabwe costs $400 (Agri-Biotech/Gwenoro Farm production figures, 2002). Please deduce the incredible subsidies provided by the US/EC tax-payers to sustain US and EC farmers: Arntzen is now holding out the prospect that we can level the playing field, at least as to vaccine production. Wow! So, provided high purity standards can be established and monitored, production is vastly more economic here than there. I am CEO of a for-profit Company that can do the job we already produce elite (virus-eliminated) potato, sweet potato and cassava for farmers at one tenth of the cost that the Developed World charges. Fully tested Hep B tomatoes would be a doddle. Just send us the GM seed or the tissue cultures.
Secondly, oral presentation is essential. In much of Africa needles are out - every fourth person in this country has HIV+ blood and in one of our neighboring countries it is one-in-three. The risks of lethal transfer would be far too high even if the needles could be provided. (For Hepatitis B however needles might be necessary as it is young babies that most need the vaccine).
Thirdly, heat stability is also needed to reach many rural folk who have yet to visit a fridge even to grab a coke. Even in our cities power cuts happen and hospitals need stand-by generators and these cannot always cope.
Fourthly, I am reassured by Arntzen’s evidence that despite the acid in our stomachs, some of the active principal, the protein, gets through to the intestines and indeed through the mucosal lining. Clearly only some diseases can be tackled via this route but let us start from there and build more robust proteins, and more cunning delivery systems. If clinical trials have already been done in the North, then there can be no objection to larger follow-up trials confirming the proof-of-concept in the South. Indeed our perceptions would not allow us to just ‘take their word’ for the efficacy: we would wish to confirm for ourselves. It would be a life-saving privilege to play a part.
It must be borne in mind that the Press has stirred emotions on the GM issue and there is a public and political perception that big, bad Multinationals are willing to use the Third World as cheap trial fodder. Whether true or not the emotional sensitivity remains. This can only be overcome by careful exposure to the truth of facts and motives. It is pleasing that Zimbabwe, at first stirred by wild stories of US “dumping” GM maize it would not use itself on starving Southern Africa, now has used its Biosafety Board’s expert advice to persuade Government that GM food is in fact acceptable and we are indeed grateful for that assistance in a time of great need. Zambia has followed suit. So it would be wise to carry out proving trials in the North and follow-up larger-scale, confirmatory trials in the South.
Priorities? The greatest prize, the greatest relief to misery, to desperation, to social disruption and collapse would be an answer to AIDS, to HIV transmission. As the ”coat-protein approach” to RNA viruses was proven in plants a decade ago, it seems logical that focused pursuit of this approach to a human retrovirus with the gp120 HIV protein must eventually yield results. The beauty of the plant vaccine concept is that even with a virus that mutates as it goes the molecular lab’s response can be quick too, once the vaccine from one version works it can surely be quickly adapted to whatever new mutation the virus comes up with? Focus here must be supported.
All round from a Zimbabwean perspective I would encourage the use of plant factories for novel protein production and would personally put my hand in the air as one who would be eager to participate with brains, enthusiasm and a Company that could if asked, deliver. We have had democratically passed regulations in Zimbabwe in place for several years, an active Biosafety Board advising Government in command and field trials are being approved. Our medical administration has in the past carried out, and is still quite capable of carrying out, well-run clinical trials. When do we begin?
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