Bioengineered bugs, drugs and contentious issues in patenting

Metagenomics and novel gene discovery

“…Identification of novel species or information from metagenomes will give clues to the metabolic and physiological requirements to enable the development of culture conditions to grow novel species. Bioengineered probiotics face tough challenges if they are ever to be realized as clinical therapeutics; the creation and use of GMOs is a sensitive issue and acceptance by consumers would require undeniable demonstrations of biological containment, safety, and ultimately, efficacy in large, double-blind, placebo controlled clinical trials 150 . Nevertheless, the extreme seriousness of increasing rates of antibiotic resistance and dissemination means that now is the time to think outside the box and intensively search out novel antimicrobials and therapeutics.…”

“…Bioengineered probiotics face tough challenges if they are ever to be realized as clinical therapeutics; the creation and use of GMOs is a sensitive issue and acceptance by consumers would require undeniable demonstrations of biological containment, safety, and ultimately, efficacy in large, double-blind, placebo controlled clinical trials. 150 Nevertheless, the extreme seriousness of increasing rates of antibiotic resistance and dissemination means that now is the time to think outside the box and intensively search out novel antimicrobials and therapeutics. It would be unfortunate to reach a stage where consumer acceptance of such novel therapies is based solely on a lack of alternatives.…”

Narrative of a versatile and adept species Pseudomonas putida

“…Bioaugmentation (addition of specific micro-organisms) can be applied to accelerate the recovery of polluted sites. The pioneering work of Chakrabarty and colleagues by propagation of novel catabolic properties through bacterial conjugation and plasmid transfer allowed isolatation of the multi-plasmid P. putida strains that were able to degrade hydrocarbons found in crude oil up to two orders of magnitude faster than the previously isolated oil-degrading bacteria [62]. Before publishing the construction and use of multi-plasmid P. putida in potential oil-spill cleanup, General Electric Company filed a patent application to the United States Patent and Trademark Office on the behalf of Chakrabary to claim both the method of construction of multi-plasmid bacteria and the bioengineered bacterium itself.…”

Prof. Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty: The Superbug Superhero!

“…Apart from his revolutionary discovery of 'bioengineered superbug', he has also achieved several other milestones including development of promiscuous bacterial protein/peptide based anticancer, anti-viral and anti-parasitic drugs. He discovered a bacterial periplasmic protein azurin from Pseudomonas aeruginosa with potent antineoplastic properties (Chakrabarty 2003(Chakrabarty , 2010. He co-founded two startup companies named CDG Therapeutics Inc., in Chicago and Amrita Therapeutics in India (https ://www.cdgti .com, https ://www.amrit ather apeut ics.com/html/chakr abart y.html) to develop vaccines, therapies and diagnostics specially for cancer and several other diseases.…”