A pair of articles in Business Week Online discussed the risk that plants genetically engineered to produce pharmaceutical drugs may get into the food chain.

Drugs Vs. Alcohol

Anheuser-Busch, which uses Missouri-grown rice to make beer, was unhappy with the plans of Ventria Biosciences. Ventria intended to plant fields in Missouri with transgenic rice, containing human genes. The additional genes cause the plant to produce two proteins, which the biotech company plans to use to treat stomach disorders.

Anheuser-Busch, worried that the transgenic plants might end up in the food crops and, in turn, their beer, announced that they would boycott Missouri rice if Ventria proceeded. Ventria eventually agreed to plant the rice in a remote corner of the state.

Growing Drugs

Plants such as rice and corn are considered ideal for "growing" drugs because they naturally produce large quantities of proteins. They can be made to produce proteins that affect humans by replacing some of their natural genetic code with human genes.

Using plants in this manner is considerably cheaper than other means used for this process, such as harvesting drugs from Chinese hamster ovaries. Plant use is estimated to cut manufacturing costs from $125 million to $4 million.

It has been predicted that the first plant-manufactured drugs will arrive on the market in 2006, and grow into a $2.2-billion-per-year industry by 2011.

Mixing With Food Crops

But there are fears that pollen from genetically engineered plants could be blown by the wind into fields containing food crops, producing contaminated hybrids, or that transgenic seeds could be carried hundreds of miles by birds.

In 2002, drug-producing transgenic corn made by ProdiGene Inc. started appearing in soybean fields in Nebraska and Iowa. The U.S. government seized 500,000 bushels of soybeans, and fined ProdiGene almost $3 million. Further problems of this nature could interfere with U.S. food sales to foreign countries, many of which are resistant to the idea of transgenic crops.

Tighter Regulation Needed

Consumer and environmental groups argue that a tighter regulatory framework is needed.  Right now, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is the only federal agency that regulates drug-producing plants; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) only steps in later, when the drugs themselves are tested. Many argue that, since the FDA's mandate includes protecting food, they should regulate the process at an earlier point in time.

Margaret Mellon, director of the food and environment program for the Union of Concerned Scientists, argued that the FDA needs to be given oversight over the whole process.

Said Mellon, "The FDA has authority to oversee drug production. The question is: When does drug production begin here? ... The FDA needs to get new authority from Congress to allow them to regulate genetically engineered organisms. There needs to be a pre-commercial review of the risks inherent in this type of production."