Scientists have found a mechanism to produce cough inhibitors and kill poppy cancer cells, paving the way for creating higher yielding varieties.
The opium popped with heroin, a drug banned from use, but also an important ingredient for producing painkillers such as morphine and codeine, as well as a noscapine cough inhibitor.
Poppy is also an important source of medicinal herbs.
Recently, researchers found that noscapine is also an effective anti-cancer agent, paving the way for clinical trials to be effective against blood cancer.
Scientists' discovery of a group of 10 genes determines the mechanism of making noscapine compounds in opium flowers paving the way for plant breeders to produce higher-yielding opium varieties.
The findings of the research team at York University and the recent GlaxoSmithKline pharmaceutical company (GSK) were published in the journal Science. UK-based GSK, the world's leading manufacturer of opium-derived ingredients, supplies about 20% of medical opiate needs with supplies from Tasmania.
Contrary to illegal opium production in many countries like Afghanistan, where growers collect opium by hand, producing opium on a commercial scale is harvested by machine.
This helps the cultivation and harvesting process save costs, even though most of the current drugs are made from synthetic chemicals or biotechnology.
