EAST LANSING, Mich. — Scientists from Michigan State University and institutions around the world are working to decode medicinal plants’ blueprints to advance drug discovery and development.
Dean DellaPenna, MSU biochemist, is helping lead the Medicinal Plant Consortium, which received a $6 million grant to decode plants’ secrets. Along with DellaPenna, the MPC is being led by researchers from the University of Kentucky, MIT and the John Innes Centre (Norwich, England).
Some well-known medicines have come from plants. For instance, the foxglove plant is the source for cardiac muscle stimulant digoxin, and the periwinkle plant offers a source for the widely used chemotherapy drugs vincristine and vinblastine. These and many other medicinal plants, often commonly found in household gardens and flower boxes, represent cornucopias of compounds ripe for discovering and developing diverse medicinal applications.
"Thanks to the funding received for these projects, the talents and skills of experts from all of these institutions have been brought together with the goal of forging a new model in drug discovery," DellaPenna said.
To develop the resources, the researchers studied the genes and chemical composition of 14 plants known for their medicinal properties or compounds with biological activity. These included plants such as foxglove, ginseng and periwinkle. Altogether, these efforts are now providing a rich toolbox for researchers to discover the means for how nature's chemical diversity is created, thus empowering efforts to uncover new drug candidates and increase the efficacy of existing ones.
During this two-year project funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, researchers set out to develop a collection of data that would aid in understanding how plants make chemicals, a process called biosynthesis. This knowledge ultimately could make it possible to engineer plants to produce larger quantities of medicinally useful compounds as well as different versions with other therapeutic potential.
More information can be found at http://medicinalplantgenomics.msu.edu.
DellaPenna’s research is partially funded by MSU AgBioResearch.
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