Poison Mushroom Medicine? How They Make Powerful Drugs

This isn't exactly the first time that something poisonous has been used for health purposes, but when researchers say that the cornerstone for toxicity in poison mushrooms can also make a host of zero side effect drugs, it's bound to raise some eyebrows.

"Mushrooms are prolific chemical factories, yet only a few of their peptides are poisonous," plant biologist Jonathan Walton recently said in a statement. "These toxins survive the high temperatures of cooking and the acids of digestion, and yet they're readily absorbed by the bloodstream and go directly to their intended target. These are the exact qualities needed for an effective medicine."

Walton recently co-led a study with a team of Michigan State University researchers, discovering that there is a sole enzyme that is key to the lethal potency of some mushrooms.

The resulting paper, newly published in the journal Chemistry and Biology, details how this enzyme could be tweaked to create drugs that home in on intended targets in the human liver without affecting any other part of the body. Such proficiency would mean no side effects for these treatment options.

But It's important to note that while the team wants the poison's delivery system, they certainly don't want the poison. You could almost say that the researchers are trying to remove the warhead from a missile. That "missile" would then be repurposed to rocket medicine into the human body, rather than applying it in the shotgun-like approach that most drugs use today.

The enzyme in question is called POPB, and it appears to convert toxins from their initial linear shape into cyclical peptides, almost like rafts designed to ride the bloodstream directly to their intended destination.

With POPB identified, the team can now craft numerous variant molecules, some of which they hope will target prime medical problems, such as drug-resistant bacteria or even cancer.

"We've [already] found some variables that are key," Walton said. "By making more variants, we can add or replace molecules that may or may not work. To date we've created a library of a hundred or so, and we eventually plan to create millions."