The clue’s in the colour – these are vast vats of carrot cells (Image: Protalix)
“MY BACKGROUND is that I’m a dentist,” says Julian Ma. In the late 1980s, though, he helped to invent something with the potential to put many dentists out of business: a way of eliminating the bacteria that cause cavities, while leaving the rest of the mouth’s flora alone. So why do we still live in fear of the dentist’s drill?
Ma’s antidote to tooth decay consists of antibodies that stop the harmful bacteria sticking to our teeth. But antibodies can be made only by living cells. Without a way to mass produce antibodies cheaply, his antidote was a non-starter. Back in 1990, however, just as Ma finished his doctorate, a solution seemed to present itself. A team in California managed to get a plant to produce antibodies. Ma made a call and soon he was on a plane to California. “That was serendipity, but it came out of a need to start producing something that would be used like toothpaste by millions, billions of people,” Ma says.
He found himself participating in the birth of a new science: pharmaceutical farming, or “pharming”. It began with big dreams. The flagship hope was the edible vaccine, which was meant to save millions of lives in poor countries by making innoculation as simple as eating fruit.
By making sophisticated medicines dirt cheap, pharming was going to open new doors. “How about, even, like, washing yourself in an antibody against Staph aureus?” Ma suggests. “You can start to wonder about where you could use antibodies in new situations. They could replace antibiotics completely.”…
