Students Concoct Ingenious Scheme To Grow Ozempic At Home

Up in Canada, students have developed an incredible new way to synthesize drugs on plants — and they're using Ozempic as their test case.

In a press release, the University of Ottowa revealed that some of its undergraduate students have invented a process that they're calling "Phytogene" turn tobacco cousin Nicotiana benthamiana into a pharmaceutical factory for the popular weight-loss drug.

Though it could have lots of use cases in the future, Phytogene's first order of business is synthesizing glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists — the class of medications Novo Nordisk's Ozempic belongs to — which mimic the stomach's feeling of fullness to help patients lose weight and lower their blood sugar.

Building on so-called "biopharming," or the process of genetically engineering plants to produce pharmaceutical proteins, the group led by bioscience students Victor Boddy and Teagan Thomas was inspired by the recent Ozempic shortage to uncover sustainable and inexpensive alternatives.

"We aim to create a future where people can reliably grow their own treatments at home," Boddy said, "free from concerns about insurance, cost, or availability."

While the nascent field of biopharming has had some success in creating vaccines and cancer treatments with the help of transgenic plants, none have been able to synthesize anything as popular as semaglutide or other GLP-1 drugs. According to a KFF poll released last year, a whopping 12 percent of Americans have taken some form of GLP-1 drug. As such, increasing access to these blockbuster drugs, which are costly and often not covered by insurance, could be a massive breakthrough.

On their award-winning "Phytogene" website, the U Ottowa students explained that essentially, the N. benthamiana plant acts as a copy machine for whatever genetic sequence they plug into it.

"With our 'plug-and-play' design, we can incorporate any peptide sequence into the plant genome," the site detailed. "The plant’s molecular machinery then transcribes and translates our peptide in impressive quantities."

Though the team was successful in "biopharming" GLP-1s on plants, they noted in the school's press release that the resulting compound hasn't yet been tested on humans.

"We are currently analyzing blood glucose and insulin levels to assess response," said Thomas, one of the project's coleaders. "We also plan to conduct bioactivity assays to test the drug's effectiveness on human cells."

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