Parkinson's disease refers to a disorder of the central nervous system that affects the body's movement and often causes limb tremors. Nerve cell damage in the brain can cause dopamine levels to drop, leading to this disease.
The medication for this disease is always in shortage; moreover, it is not available in all parts of the world freely. Hence, to counter this problem, a recent group of researchers has engineered tomatoes that would produce L-DOPA, a vital Parkinson's medicine-This could lead to a decrease in medication cost, which might affect Parkinson's Disease Treatment Market.
The idea of using common crops and plants to generate molecules for therapeutic procedures is not novel and has been used many times before. The tobacco plant has been genetically modified to switch off its immune system. It is now widely used for producing everything from polio vaccines and flu medicines to anti-inflammatory proteins for humans.
The researchers took tomatoes as a plant and turned them into medicine-producing bio-factories. The reason for choosing tomatoes, particularly for this method, was that they could be grown in almost every part of the world. Due to this, buyers and sellers get a cheap way to obtain a medicine that is essential for overcoming the disease. Moreover, it also makes the drug easier to acquire, which, in any other circumstance, might not be the case.
It is because tomatoes can be grown with little to no infrastructure. As genetically modified organisms (GMOs), they can be grown in screen houses, in a controlled environment with very narrow meshes so that the pollen could not escape through insects. After their production through this method, they could be scaled up at a relatively low cost.
Researchers opted to produce L-DOPA with tomatoes' as it is essential to counter Parkinson's disease. This medicine can be easily extracted and purified from the grown tomatoes using methods with low technological costs. After that, they can be distributed to people living around the area.
The team has stated that 1 kg of tomatoes would produce 150 mg of L-DOPA approximately. Moreover, it has been suggested that making medicine in this manner might reduce the side effects that are caused by taking its chemically synthesized version.
In addition to this, there are many beneficial effects of produced medicine, including improvement in shelf life, increased level of amino acids, etc. These beneficial effects create the need for further investigation of this method. Also, it shows that tomatoes can be considered a healthy option when it comes to synthetic biology.