{"id":38366,"date":"2025-08-01T21:06:22","date_gmt":"2025-08-01T21:06:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/38366\/"},"modified":"2025-08-01T21:06:22","modified_gmt":"2025-08-01T21:06:22","slug":"the-australian-push-to-turn-food-into-medicine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/38366\/","title":{"rendered":"The Australian push to turn food into medicine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt\u2019s about 100 or so times more potent than gabapentin, which is the clinically used drug for neuropathic pain,\u201d Craik, from UQ\u2019s Institute for Molecular Bioscience, said. His team then genetically tweaked mustard plants to produce the venom-derived cyclotide.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose seeds are tiny, the size of a pinhead, so they\u2019re never going to be enough to be therapeutic. But we\u2019d be interested in putting it into something bigger \u2026 peanuts or chickpeas.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The circular structure of cyclotides protects them from being destroyed by digestion, and means they hold potential as new drugs.Credit: Wikipedia\/Public domain<\/p>\n

Craik\u2019s team has also crafted cherry tomatoes that contain a cyclopeptide going through clinical trials in Sweden as an experimental treatment for multiple sclerosis symptoms.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s very hard for a new drug to make it through the clinical trial process, and many promising candidates falter. But if the peptide proves effective, Craik can imagine people with multiple sclerosis eating a Greek salad or sipping a Bloody Mary made with the tomatoes and feeling their symptoms ease.<\/p>\n

The ARC grant and partnership will also explore a cholesterol-reducing drug that could be spliced into vegetables, as well as a peptide that targets an appetite receptor and induces fullness. Craik said it could serve as an alternative to Ozempic.<\/p>\n

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\u201cMy dream would be to put that into potatoes so that you could have your McDonald\u2019s French fries and not worry about obesity.\u201d<\/p>\n

These products, at this stage, are hypothetical. One of the research goals is to have a food product ready for trials by the end of the three-year grant.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also unclear which regulatory jurisdiction the products would fall under. Whether they\u2019re considered nutraceuticals, medicines, or genetically modified foods will dictate which bodies need to be involved before they\u2019re grown and sold commercially, such as the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re hoping, to start with, that they will fall under a nutraceutical, where it\u2019s a very light dose, and you\u2019d have to eat tonnes of product to get anywhere dangerous,\u201d said Phyllome chief executive Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin.<\/p>\n

Phyllome grows packaged vegetables such as spinach and rocket in automated \u201cplant factories\u201d. Robots whizz around the indoor vertical farm in inner Sydney\u2019s Alexandria and take a photo of plants every hour, analysing the crops with AI, and harvest them when they\u2019re ready.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The research aims to have a food product ready for the next stage of trials by the end of the three-year project.Credit: Matt Davidson<\/p>\n

\u201cIn essence, our entire farm here has zero human interaction, from sowing through to picking bags off the back of a packager,\u201d Eckersley-Maslin said. \u201cEverything in the middle is automated by robots.\u201d<\/p>\n

The partnership will first focus on growing peptides aimed at pain relief, cholesterol management and appetite suppression in the native tobacco plant Nicotiana benthamiana.<\/p>\n

The tobacco plants can\u2019t be eaten, but work as natural \u201cbio-factories\u201d to produce the target peptides, which can be extracted from the plant\u2019s leaves.<\/p>\n

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The plants were discovered near Wolf Creek in Western Australia, of Hollywood horror fame, and proved useful because they have weak immune systems, which makes it easier to insert the genes that code for the production of cyclotides.<\/p>\n

The next stage of the research will work on making the same genetic tweaks in plants that produce food.<\/p>\n

Said Craik: \u201cIt\u2019s sort of, if you like, going back 3000 years to Hippocrates, who said, \u2018Let food be thy medicine\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIt\u2019s about 100 or so times more potent than gabapentin, which is the clinically used drug for neuropathic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38367,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[64,63,137,490],"class_list":{"0":"post-38366","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-medication","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-medication"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}