Taxol® and enzymes; work at Michigan State University
Recently Michigan State University had a news release describing Kevin Walker’s work investigating 5 enzymes that are may pave the way to producing Taxol ® (paclitaxel) from E. Coli. His group is investigating five enzymes important for the functionalization of the paclitaxel core. Having started my career at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) in the early 90’s I have been exposed to the chemistry and development related to paclitaxel for almost 15 years in the industry and now as a consultant, taxane related work is a key part of my business. While I find the work recently reported in Chemistry and Biology interesting I’m wondering if they aren’t somewhat behind in this area. BMS has been collaborating with Phyton to produce Taxol via plant cell culture since 1993 and this is how BMS currently produces Taxol®. I do think this could potentially be useful for next generation taxane products. While there have been numerous derivatives described in the literature and in patents, with the exception of Taxotere® (doectaxel), none have yet been brought to market.
While I’m hopeful that some of these derivatives may hold hope for the future. Paclitaxel and most derivatives all suffer from poor solubility and problems with formulation. I spent five years at a previous employer working on putting paclitaxel and other drugs on a poly-amino acid polymer which dramatically improved both solubility as well as drug distribution to the tumor tissue. I think the combination of these drugs with appropriate polymer backbones is a promising technology for the future.
Technorati Tags: Taxol
Related Posts:
Bookmark it with:
| 
del.icio.us
| 
Digg it
| 
Furl
| 
Simpy
| 
Spurl
| 
My Yahoo!
|
