Scientists announced they had unlocked a pathway for producing opiates from genetically-engineered yeasts, but some fear this could make it easier for illicit drugs to be produced at home.
Experts have said the finding means almost anyone could use yeast to create codeine and other drugs using a home-brew beer kit, the AFP reported.
"We're likely looking at a timeline of a couple of years, not a decade or more, when sugar-fed yeast could reliably produce a controlled substance," said UC Berkeley bioengineer John Dueber in a news release. "The time is now to think about policies to address this area of research. The field is moving surprisingly fast, and we need to be out in front so that we can mitigate the potential for abuse."
The findings come up with a number of benefits such as creating Benzylisoquinoline alkaloids (BIAs). which are the class of highly bioactive compounds found in poppy. This means the method could be used to produce pharmaceutical such as morphine and hydrocodone.
"Plants have slow growth cycles, so it's hard to fully explore all the possible chemicals that can be made from the BIA pathway by genetically engineering the poppy," said study lead author William DeLoache, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in bioengineering. "Moving the BIA pathway to microbes dramatically reduces the cost of drug discovery. We can easily manipulate and tune the DNA of the yeast and quickly test the results."
In order to keep the highly beneficial process from being used used for illegal drug production, the researchers suggest restricting engineered yeast strains to only licensed facilities.
"An additional concern is that once the knowledge of how to create an opiate-producing strain is out there, anyone trained in basic molecular biology could theoretically build it," Dueber said.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Nature Chemical Biology, and a related commentary was published in the journal Nature.
