RhodococcusCambridge and MIT launch joint research into the smelly bug that can eat TNT and may help produce a cheaper treatment for AIDSRhodococcus is a bacterium that lives in the soil, it has been around for millions of years and when you smell it, it gives off the cheesy whiff of old socks. Although it does not sound a very pleasant sort of bug, Rhodococcus may provide a cheaper and more environmentally friendly method of making a key drug for AIDS. Scientists on both sides of the Atlantic think so. Now The Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) has just committed £1.1 million to form a joint team to carry out the research to prove it. The team - led by Anthony J Sinskey, Professor of Microbiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Dr John Archer of Cambridge University's Genetics Department - also has the backing of several pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Together these firms are providing nearly £2 million in additional support to the study, which will run for five years. Alan Windle, Executive Director of The Cambridge-MIT Institute, says: "This is a remarkable project. To persuade a bug to help make a drug is intriguing in itself. The work is to be directed to improving the production of a treatment for AIDS, and is an excellent example of the kind of benefits to flow from CMI, the new joint venture between MIT and the University of Cambridge." At Cambridge, Dr John Archer and his research group have already done preliminary work on the biology of Rhodococcus - a bug that is already being used by companies to manufacture other drugs, including the contraceptive pill. "It's a fascinating bacterium that originally evolved to eat the trees that died and lay rotting in prehistoric swamps," Dr Archer says. "Today, it's one of nature's dustbins. It eats a vast array of complex molecules, recycling them in the environment. It can do this because it's equipped with a huge library of different enzymes - the molecular equivalent of a Swiss army knife - that helps it eat fuel, carcinogens (cancer-causing chemicals) like benzene, and even explosives like TNT." It is Rhodococcus's ability to eat certain complex molecules that interests the joint research team. At MIT, Professor Sinskey and his team have isolated the key genes in a strain of Rhodococcus that they think can help more efficiently produce an AIDS treatment called protease inhibitor. This works by slowing down the generation of new AIDS virus particles in the human body. It therefore slows down the rate of progress of the disease. However there are two possible forms - called isomers - of the building blocks (or chemical precursors) used to produce a protease inhibitor: a left-handed form and a right-handed one and only one of them has a therapeutic use. Rhodococcus's role would be to filter out the useless form. It can do this by eating a cheap chemical compound (called indene) and after digesting it, turn that into the useful building block for such an AIDS drug. "We could make the drug more cost effectively from a cheap chemical stock, which would be better for patients and better for the environment, " says Dr Archer, "if we could selectively produce the useful isomer; we think Rhodococcus has the potential to do this on an industrial scale." He adds: "Increasingly, new drugs are derived from living cell factories, rather than chemical ones. This represents an improved, more sustainable source." In order to achieve this outcome however, the scientists will first have to produce an entire genetic and metabolic 'roadmap' of Rhodococcus so they can understand how all its genes and enzymes work, before working out how best to manipulate it to produce the useful building block. Further down the line, the researchers hope that this new 'cell factory' technology will lead to new treatments for other diseases, and several other spin-offs that are both medically and commercially successful. "The CMI grant is invaluable," says Dr Archer. "There is a real research synergy on this project between Cambridge and MIT, because we have done the preliminary work on the biology of Rhodococcus, and at MIT, Professor Sinskey's group have studied the genetics and chemistry of the 'building block' metabolism. This is a long-term, high-risk project, but we hope it will lead not only to new drugs, but also to students training in new technologies and spinning off new companies as a result." For more details on this subject, please contact:
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