Bonding with bacteria

RESEARCH: Ananda M Chakrabarty is in India, scouting for a pharma company that will help him develop a bacteria-based cancer drug.

Few Indians have heard of Ananda M Chakrabarty, but in biotechnology circles the distinguished professor of immunology and microbiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago is something of a hero.

His invention "" a transgenic bacteria which breaks down crude oil into simpler substances easily consumed by marine animals "" is, by itself, significant.

But Chakrabarty will go down in history as the first man to get a patent for a living micro-organism. It was in 1979, when he was working for General Electric in the United States, that Chakrabarty developed the oil-eating bacteria.

He applied for a patent, proposing to use his invention in mopping up oil spills. The application was turned down by the Patent Office Board of Appeals, but the battle went up to the US Supreme Court, which favoured Chakrabarty, saying that "A live, human-made micro-organism is patentable subject matter".

That was 25 years ago and Chakrabarty has since moved on. His present interest is in using bacterial proteins to combat killer diseases like malaria, HIV and cancer using what he calls bacteria's "evolutionary knowledge".

"Unlike modern pharmaceutical industry which is content with arresting cancer along one pathway, bacteria consider cancer cells as intruders and work to stop them in their tracks," explains Chakrabarty with the lucidity of a teacher.

He has even developed a potential drug for melanoma and breast cancer that has shown 60-80 per cent results in mice. "I don't know if it'll work in dogs and cats, much less monkeys before the FDA will allow me to use it on humans."

In India to deliver a series of lectures, Chakrabarty will also make time to meet captains of the Indian drug industry to tell them, "Let's do some of that here". His proposal "" "You put in the resources to set up a lab to develop a new generation of drugs. Let's do clinical trials and design products for the global market".

Chakrabarty is optimistic that the corporate houses will be more forthcoming than the academics and researchers, whom he'd talked to last year for collaborative research to check whether his promising drug could be used against cervical cancer, one of the most common cancers in India.

He even had a tentative funding commitment from the department of biotechnology for a small business innovative research company, formed for the project. But nothing came of it.

"Indians want to just publish papers on how cancers grow, how they proceed... they want to be known in the United States and Japan. But no one talks about trying to develop a drug against cervical cancer... Merck comes up with a vaccine but nobody in India does it."

What Chakrabarty would ideally like is for India to have something like the Bayh-Dole Act in the US, which allows universities and small businesses to hold intellectual property rights over inventions resulting from government-funded research.

"I want to introduce the concept of academic start-ups which has contributed so much to the economic might of the US," he says.

Like Genentech, Kyron and Biogen, all started by university professors, Chakrabarty too is a beneficiary of Bayh-Dole. It is his company, CDG Therapeutics, in which the University of Illinois has some equity, that is conducting the research into this potentially revolutionary drug and which will tie up with any Indian pharma company which is willing to check it out. Now if only Indian researchers saw the point.