Author: John Carter

Home-brew heroin: soon anyone will be able to make illegal drugs

The strains themselves should be altered to make them hard to grow outside specialised facilities, for instance by making them dependent on unusual nutrients. The strains should also be kept in secure, government-licensed facilities. And companies that sell custom DNA sequences should refuse to supply the genes needed to engineer such strains. Because more serotonin molecules are then hanging around receptors for longer, they continue to stimulate them.

Some fear that drug use could soar if home-brewing makes drugs easily available. Around 40% of all medicinal drugs target just one superfamily of receptors – the G-protein coupled receptors. There are variations on these drug mechanisms, including partial agonists and ones that act like antagonists but slightly differently. Overall though, a lot of drugs actions fall into the categories described above. The brain does so with the help of serotonin transporters in the nerve terminal membrane.

Most of us never have to worry about chenodeoxycholic acid (CDCA), one of the two primary bile acids produced by the liver. But, for a tiny number of people, a rare genetic trait means they end up short. Having this gene variant prevents the body from creating sterol 27-hydroxylase, a liver enzyme.

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“The only reason an improvement has not been determined yet, is that the insurers have been uninterested or unwilling to enter into any substantive negotiations,” it claims. But in 2008, Leadiant acquired the rights to Chenofalk, and developed its own version, known as CDCA Leadiant. Then, nine days before Christmas 2014, it succeeded in getting its version classified as an “orphan medicine” for treating CTX. That classification gave Leadiant the exclusive right to manufacture its CDCA drug commercially in Europe for the next 10 years. In 2017, the price of CDCA Leadiant – by now the only remaining CDCA option on the market – was increased from around €30,000 per patient per year to about €150,000.

Morphine, for instance, wasn’t designed by the body but can be found naturally in opium poppies. By luck it mimics the shape of the natural opioid agonists, the endorphins, that are natural pain relievers responsible for the “endorphin high”. Wouter Beke, the Belgian consumer affairs minister, used his price-regulation powers to bring down the price of CDCA Leadiant to just over €3,600 a month – roughly a quarter of the amount Leadiant was charging.

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By further engineering the yeast they created hydrocodone, a common semi-synthetic opioid. The final pathway that yielded the hydrocodone, their final product, expressed 23 different enzymes usually found in plants, mammals, bacteria, and yeast. To achieve this, Dueber’s group has created yeast that produces S-reticuline, the main precursor of all 2500 molecules, by adding the genes for various plant enzymes. With the addition of further enzymes, it will be possible to create yeast strains that make one or more of these molecules. It will also be possible to create related molecules that do not exist in nature, including new kinds of opiates.

1. Their next problem is how to regulate the market in psychoactive chemicals.
2. Around 40% of all medicinal drugs target just one superfamily of receptors – the G-protein coupled receptors.
3. They describe how an enzyme was extracted from the sugar beet (Beta vulgaris), and through a series of genetic modifications, was able to produce the reaction without destroying the l-DOPA molecules.
4. As Australian medic David Caldicott told me, “If you treated any illness with the same antibiotic for 50 years, medical people would be stunned if resistance hadn’t developed.” New strains and mutations call for new medicines.

Certainly not the vendors of these drugs, who dodge the law by saying they are not for human consumption. Methamphetamine production is also an environmental concern; it involves many easily obtained chemicals that are hazardous, such as acetone, anhydrous ammonia (fertilizer), ether, red phosphorus, and lithium. Toxicity from these chemicals can remain in the environment around a methamphetamine production lab long after the lab has been shut down, causing a wide range of damaging effects to health. Environmental Protection Agency has provided guidance on cleanup and remediation of methamphetamine labs. Receptors are large protein molecules embedded in the cell wall, or membrane.

Currently, most methamphetamine in the United States is produced by transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) in Mexico.44 This methamphetamine is highly pure, potent, and low in price. The drug can be easily made in small clandestine laboratories, with relatively inexpensive over-the-counter ingredients such as pseudoephedrine, a common ingredient in cold medications. Distributing opiate-making yeasts strains should be made illegal.

It can cause cataracts, dementia, neurological problems and seizures – but it can be treated. Since the 1970s, the pharma industry has been able to produce CDCA, and so people who need it can supplement their shortage. The system worked well; the drug was relatively cheap for such a niche illness. A year’s treatment cost about €30,000 (£26,000) per patient – until suddenly it didn’t.

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She is now a highly respected hospital pharmacist based at Amsterdam UMC’s Academic Medical Centre, a cavernous building crafted out of concrete on the south-east fringe of the Dutch capital. Until last year, for instance, coca cultivation in Colombia had been declining. But the criminal gangs didn’t vanish; instead, they turned to illegal mining and logging, says Liliana Davalos of Stony Brook University in New York, who has studied the environmental impacts of coca growing.

Previous studies have shown that certain enzymes can successfully convert tyrosine – an amino acid found in glucose, produced naturally by yeast – into the molecule l-DOPA. This molecule signals to the brain to release the ‘feel-good’ chemical dopamine, which is what you want from a painkiller. But scientists have struggled in the past to make a viable product, because each of these enzymes pushed the reaction too far and destroyed the l-DOPA before it could be of any use. Yeasts capable of doing this do not exist yet, but none of the researchers that New Scientist spoke to had any doubt that they soon will. “The field is moving much faster than we had previous realised,” says John Dueber of the University of California, Berkeley, whose team has just created a yeast that produces the main precursor of opiates. Until recently, Dueber had thought the creation of, say, a morphine-making yeast was 10 years away.

To understand what happened next, you have to understand several things about Kemper. One was that early experience of losing friends to illness, which instilled in her an urge to do everything she can to make sick people better. The second is that, although she is highly accomplished, Kemper is self-admittedly hard-headed, and has always had a rebellious streak. But training is hypercompetitive in the Netherlands, where Kemper grew up. She liked chemistry, so chose a career in pharmacy instead. She studied for six years and did a residency for another four.

Synthesising drugs like methamphetamines in small illegal labs, meanwhile, requires not only expertise but also the right chemical ingredients. Cutting off the supply of these chemicals is one of the main strategies of drug enforcement efforts. This would be impossible with homebrew drugs – the only raw material needed is sugar. If these kinds of biosynthetic yeasts became widely available, they could transform the drug market.