PATRICK PERRY: So the plants you see behind me are small, young seedlings of a plant that's
known as artemisia annua. It’s also known as sweet wormwood or annual sagewort, and
some people even refer to it as sweet Annie. It's a medicinal herb that originated in southeastern
Asia and has been used in traditional eastern medicine for hundreds of years.
JILL KOLESAR: how I originally became involved is I met a gentleman named Peter Seeberger,
who is actually the director of the Max Planck University in Germany, and he was in town,
actually, setting up a collaboration with the Kentucky tobacco group.
The drug for treating malaria comes from this plant, and what Dr. Seeberger did and his
colleague Kerry Gilmore, also from Max Planck -- what they did is they figured out a way
of getting the drug out of the plant because historically you have to lay it out in the
fields and let it dry. And so, whenever there is any weather problem, you can have a lot
of crop damage PATRICK PERRY: Current global production practices
are relatively primitive. Everything is done by hand. Very labor-intensive. Very small
scale. So, they’re very interested with Kentucky's
history in tobacco production and industrial hemp production that a transplant system for
artemisia annua would fit the bill in our climate quite well.
We start off with raw seed. We seed trays, they grow for about 30 to 35 days. And then
they're transported to the field and transplanted with the exact same equipment that a tobacco
farmer would have on hand. From there, the crop is managed until the
optimal harvest time is determined. And that's when the pharmaceutical content within the
leaves is at its highest. Once the plants are cut, they are then dried and those leaves
can be used for extraction and further purification of purified pharmaceuticals or also blended
with coffee or tea as consumable beverages to be consumed right away.
So, this plant biosynthesizes compounds that have been in the past and primarily are used
for the treatment of malaria.
The two of interest are compounds called artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin
JILL KOLESAR: So the artemisinin is the active ingredient. But it's not very stable once
you get it out of the plant, and so a chemical process is used to convert the artemisinin
into our artesunate. And that makes it more a drug. You can make it into a pill.
FREDERICK UELAND: Ovarian cancer is a difficult disease to treat. It presents typically in
advanced stage, where survival rates are not as good as early stage. And as such, we have
difficulty with recurrence and resistance to chemotherapy agents.
Artesunate has been studied in the lab, Dr. Kolesar’s lab, by her group and our GYN
oncology group against ovarian cancer. And it shows a pretty significant cell kill in
the lab against ovarian cancer cells, not only just chemo naive cells, which have not
been treated yet, but also cells that have become resistant to standard chemotherapy,
so that's the exciting part. It seems to be dose dependent as well, so the higher the
doses the better the cell kill. We're looking at what doses are safe.
So we start with a phase 1 trial.
It will be given to patients who have completed their primary therapy,
which is surgery and cytotoxic chemotherapy.
And frequently there'll be a phase of observation
where there is no active therapy being given. And that's a trying time for patients.
It is difficult to just watch and wait sometimes.
JILL KOLESAR: So we had the idea of giving
the tea and coffee once or twice a day to patients who are not
getting any active therapy to see if it would prevent a relapse.
It's kind of a similar situation in AML. Once a child is treated for their AML, they just
start followed over time to see if their disease recurs.
And they don't get any active treatment.
So our idea there, also based on in vitro work in the laboratory showing it had
anticancer activity against cell lines of childhood AML-- we had the idea of using it
in children to see if it would prevent a recurrence of AML.
Investigators in China assessed artemisia annua extracts antiviral activity against
the original SARS-CoV and showed that it had good antiviral activity, again, in the laboratory.
And so Dr. Seeberger was building on that work and tried out the extracts against the
current SARS-CoV-2 and, again, showed good activity, based on that and, again,
Its good tolerability profile, we decided that we would test it in patients who have COVID.
We've been studying it in the laboratory for
two to three years, and so it's really exciting when something that is promising in the laboratory
is actually promising enough to take into a clinical trial. We're uniquely first because
we're the ones who were studying it in the laboratory,
and we're the ones who are growing it in Kentucky.
It is truly the dream to take a plant from
our fields to our laboratories and then to patients and potentially help them.
PATRICK PERRY: So, I'm a sixth generation Kentuckian. And all of my father's side of
the family had been growing tobacco for all their lives.
There's a lot of producers out there, small farms, especially here in Central Kentucky,
who have lost a cash crop opportunity that you would see in tobacco.
So what we've done here is developed, really, the world's first scalable production model
that we can use American technology, intuition, and know-how to really scale this up pretty rapidly.
And we as American farmers, Kentucky farmers especially, are very prepared to make
that happen, which would then hopefully in the future mark
Kentucky as maybe the epicenter of artemisia production in the world.
It's my hope that with good news from the
clinical trials that are ongoing here at the university, that Kentucky producers will be
able to take what we've learned and actually grow a crop that could really make a difference
in not only their lives, but the community and the world as well. That's my dream is
to really make this work. And to be honest with you, I haven't really believed in something
as much as I believe in this in a very long time.