People have asked the question, “If Griffithsin is such a potent anti-viral, why is it not being manufactured? Why is it not generally available and being used to stop viral outbreaks such as Covid-19?” It’s a very good question. There are a few efforts being made to biomanufacture griffithsin and at least one to get it into clinical trials. In March, 2020, I couldn’t find anything to indicate that it was in any pharma company pipeline. I decided that if no one is working on this, I would put my shoulder to the wheel and do work on its development. First I reached out to researchers around the world who had worked with griffithsin. I reached out to my friends in the biohacking community. There were a few people who responded at first and we started a group of friends to take on a rather enormous project with a goal of making griffithsin available to the world.
The arts of molecular biology and biotechnology demonstrate that
genes from one organism may be placed into another organism which will read the
sequence information and from it make a peptide or polypeptide in the cells. There is a large and thriving industry based
on this. We were searching for the best
method for biohackers with limited resources to use to produce griffithsin on
an epic scale. Most of our experience
with protein expression had been with bacteria so far. E-coli is widely used for this because it
grows rapidly and is relatively inexpensive and easy to work with. Bacteria has certain drawbacks, however. For example bacteria is a prokaryote, lacking
organelles and the protein folding may not work well in eukaryotes such as
animals. On the other end of things,
much pharmaceutical Biomanufacturing uses animal cells for expression. The folding then is correct for animal or
human use. The drawback with animal
cells is that they are difficult to work with, grow slowly, and are extremely
subject to contamination by any number of organisms. Stringent laboratory procedures are needed to
ensure sterility during transfection and the growth cycle. This works well for pharmaceutical companies
with the resources to carry it out, however Biomanufacturing using animal cells
is very expensive to set up and maintain.
Some of the scientists who responded to our inquiries used
plants to express griffithsin with good results. Dr. Yavar Vafaee, Ph.D. had published his
research:
“Heterologous production of recombinant anti-HIV microbicide griffithsin in
transgenic lettuce and tobacco lines” and was very kind in advising and
getting me started in the exciting new direction of plant molecular
biology. We also were fortunate to find Dr. Evangelia
Vamvaka, Ph.D. who had
been working in Dr. Jennifer Doudna’s lab at UCB. She had previously done a great deal of
research with griffithsin and published papers such as “Rice endosperm is cost-effective for the
production of recombinant griffithsin with potent activity against HIV”. After
reading her papers and speaking with her, we decided that her method was the
one that would work the best to meet our biomanufacturing goals as biohackers
with limited resources. Expression in
rice has a number of advantages, such as rice being non-toxic and generally
regarded as safe, and when harvested and dried, it can be stored for long
periods of time without trouble. Dr. Vamvaka’s research shows that the folding
of the protein is correct and that the antiviral properties are present as expressed in rice.
