Could Plant Pills Treat Hemophilia?

Imagine every small cut, scrape, and scratch proving a potentially fatal wound, where the blood just never stops pouring. That's life every day for patients with serious hemophilia. However, now researchers believe they can treat this dangerous condition with the help of modified plant material.

Hemophilia is caused when the body in incapable of creating attacks proteins essential to stemming the flow of blood, called clotting factors. Some patients can be treated with regular injections of the life-saving proteins, but some have overly vigilant immune systems. Identifying the new clotting factors as foreign cells, some hemophiliac immune systems viciously eliminate any new clotting proteins, rendering treatment ineffective.

With these factors constantly being eliminated by their own immune systems, patients have an impossibly difficult time stopping even the smallest of bleeds.

However, there is hope yet. A study recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Blood details how plant cells can help teach a hemophiliac immune system to tolerate these clotting factors, resolving this dangerous situation.

According to the study, researchers used genetic insertion to successfully craft tobacco and lettuce plant cells that can both enter the blood through the intestines, and be recognized by the immune system in the same way foreign clotting factors are.

After feeding lab mice capsules of the modified plant cells twice a week for two months, the researcher found that traditionally resistant immune systems were learning to accept the presence of the cells. When clotting factor therapy was introduced in these mice, the traditionally rejected cells were not attacked by immune system agents, called antibodies.

"The only current treatments against [antibody] formation cost $1 million and are risky for patients," said Henry Daniell, interim chairman of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine and a co-author on the study. "Our technique, which uses plant-based capsules, has the potential to be a cost-effective and safe alternative."

"This is a major step forward," added co-author Roland Herzog. "Oral tolerance is ideal is because you are feeding them something specific that addresses the problem and you don't have to use drugs that suppress the immune system. It's not invasive. You're not manipulating patients' cells. It would be an ideal way to do it."

It will still be some time before these pills are even tested in humans, but Daniell, Herzog and the Penn Center for Innovation are now reportedly working with a pharmaceutical company to test this strategy in other animal species.