Safflower's new Avtar

Ever since I adopted Safflower as my candidate crop for trying out various KMS approaches, I am on the prowl for nuggets of knowledge relating to safflower and Voila!!! Safflower is engineered to produce pharmaceutical products like Biosimilar Insulin and Apo A1 Milano, and food ingredients like Chymosin.

SemBioSys Genetics, a Canadian company based in Calgary, Alberta announced that it has produced human insulin in transgenic safflower, by inserting a human insulin gene into a safflower plant. The technology has led to the recovery of human insulin as the plant grows and seeds develop. The transgenic safflower was engineered to express an oleosin-human pro-insulin protein exclusively in its seed. Pro-insulin is the precursor to insulin which is converted into a type of insulin called SBS-1000. Tests have indicated that SBS-1000 is identical to human insulin. Existing commercial insulin production methods typically rely on yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) or bacteria (Escherichia coli) that were genetically engineered to produce synthetic human insulin. These organisms are grown in large, steel bio-reactors and then insulin is extracted and purified for final formulation. The company says that it can produce one kilogram of insulin per acre of safflower production, which is enough to supply 2,500 patients for one year of treatment and that the world's total insulin demand in 2010 can be met by less than 16,000 acres of safflower crop. The company claims that this breakthrough in plant-produced insulin have the potential to fundamentally transform the economics and scale of insulin production. In that case it is certainly going to transform the economics and scale of production of safflower crop too.

The company has also modified safflower seed lines to express Apolipoprotein A1 and its variant Apolipoprotein A1 (Milano), collectively referred to Apo A1, which is a next-generation cardiovascular drug that targets the removal of atherosclerotic plaque from arteries. As a major component of the high-density lipoprotein complex ("good cholesterol"), ApoA-I helps to clear cholesterol from arteries. ApoA-1 Milano is a naturally occurring mutant of ApoA-I, found in a family descended from a single couple of the 18th century. Discovered by accident, the mutation was found to be present in about 3.5% of the population of Limone sul Garda, a small village in northern Italy. It has been traced to a mutation in a single man who had lived in the village in the 1700s and passed it on to his offspring. ApoA1 Milano was first identified by Dr Cesare Sirtori in Milan, who also demonstrated that its presence significantly reduced cardiovascular disease, even though it caused a reduction in HDL levels and an increase in triglyceride levels.

SemBioSys has extended its plant-based technology platform to non-pharmaceutical products as well and signed an option agreement with The Instituto de Agrobiotecnologia Rosario S.A. (INDEAR) based in Rosario, Argentina for producing Chymosin from transgenic safflower. Chymosin, also called rennet, is a natural enzyme used in the production of cheese obtained originally from calve stomachs. Bovine chymosin is produced nowadays recombinantly in E. coli, Aspergillus niger var awamori, and Kluyveromyces lactis as alternative resource to the one from the cows. SemBiosys says chymosin is significantly cheaper to produce using its proprietary plant expression system which is versatile, scalable and cost effective  offering compelling economic advantages relative to traditional sources of chymosin enzyme.

Crop Biofactories Initiative, a  joint venture between CSIRO and the Grains Research and Development Corporation, is developing of genetically modified safflower to deliver important fatty acids and oils for the chemicals industry as potential replacements for petrochemicals in the manufacture of industrial products. CSIRO chose safflower as its first biofactory platform crop because it is hardy, easy to grow, widely adapted and easily isolated from food production systems. It is widely adapted to Australian production regions; and has flexible production timing with potentially continuous supply scenarios.

The much neglected promising crop of the past is getting reincarnated as a profitable pharmaceutical and industrial crop of the future!