Pharm Crop Products In US Market

Prof. Joe Cummins discovers that dangerous GM pharmaceutical crops have been produced and marketed in the United States for at least two years, unbeknownst to the public, via a gaping loophole in the regulatory process.

There has been a great deal of public opposition recently to the testing of rice genetically modified to produce the human proteins lysozyme and lactoferrin in the United States. So far, those tests have been stalled (see SiS 22).

But, Sigma-Aldrich, a US chemical company, has been marketing the biopharmaceutical products trypsin, avidin and beta-glucuronidase (GUS) processed from transgenic maize, for at least two years. Meanwhile, Prodigene Corporation and Sigma-Aldrich are marketing aprotinin (AproliZean) from maize and from a transgenic tobacco.

Trypsin is a digestive enzyme used extensively in research, to treat disease and in food processing. The product TrypZean is marketed as an animal free product, and is produced jointly by Sigma-Aldrich and Prodigene (the company fined for contaminating food crops with biopharmaceuticals in the United States last year).