Students from the University of Ottawa have come up with a brilliant way to essentially make copies of pharmaceutical drugs using plants. Their creation is called “Phytogene,” and they’ve used it to turn a plant related to tobacco into an Ozempic copy machine that you can plant in the ground.
Ozempic, and all the other GLP-1 weight loss medications that help curb appetites, are the “It” pharmaceuticals of the moment. But when there was a recent Ozempic shortage, bioscience majors Victor Boddy and Teagan Thomas tried to find a sustainable, low-cost way to make it at home.
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The idea was simple but sounded so far-fetched that it might as well be a fantasy: find a way to enable people to grow the medications they need at home “free from concerns about insurance, cost, or availability,” as Victor said in a press release.
A Homemade Version of Ozempic?
In essence, they want to…
