'Complex' sugars may provide simple remedy for infections

Imagine a therapeutic and beneficial sugar found naturally in the body, and a sugar that has never existed in any one place in more than a few handfuls. Former Biology Department Chairperson Stephen Roth, the chief executive officer of the Horsham, Pa.-based Neose Technologies Inc., knows how to make this sugar, and for the first time in history a factory will be making large amounts of this precious substance. Neose and Roth aren't just making one sugar, but several different types of complex sugars, which are combinations of several simple sugars. When inserted into the body, this type of sugar serves to attract bacteria so that they leave the body's cells alone -- thus fighting off infections. While similar to using antibiotics, this technique is more useful because the bacteria cannot become immune to it. Manufacturing a simple sugar isn't too difficult, but according to Roth, combining them to make the intricate structure of a complex sugar is such an arduous task that mass-production has been impossible -- until now. "Two simple sugars, like glucose and galactose, can be stuck together in 20 different ways. That makes manufacturing [complex sugars] very, very difficult chemically," Roth explained. In order to mass produce the sugars, Roth decided to use enzymes to speed up the process. An enzyme is basically a chemical mediator made of protein that regulates reactions between two substances in the body. "In theory, anything that an enzyme does will happen by itself, but you may have to wait for, say, 10,000 years," Roth said. "If you don't have that kind of time, then an enzyme could make it happen in 10 minutes." The process moved the dreams of a few Penn researchers into a commercial reality. Roth left the Biology department in 1992 to work on medicinal applications of complex sugars at Neose. "When we started the company, the real question was, 'Can you make the enzymes produce these compounds in large amounts?'" Roth recalled. "Now nobody asks that anymore. It's always, 'How inexpensive can you make it?'" Before Roth discovered a cheap way to make the sugars, scientists weren't sure exactly how it might be useful. "Everyone knew that sugars must have some critically important function but because the technology wasn't available we really couldn't figure out what that function was," remembered Emory University Cellular Biology Department chairperson Barry Shur, who is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board at Neose. "Now that the technology is available it's becoming obvious that sugars are really important." A first application of complex sugars as an anti-infective could be to put it in infant formula. "Breast-fed babies are much less likely to get bacterial infectious diseases than formula-fed babies," Roth explained. "The thought is that the [sugars] protect the breast-fed babies." Neose is working on several other possibilities, as well. It has agreements with Bristol-Meyers Squibb to work on a cancer vaccine and with a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson to produce a sugar commonly grown in plants. Future prospects range from anti-plaque treatments to cosmetic applications for the skin, according to Neose's World Wide Web site. But despite all the optimism, Shur cautioned that in an unpredictable market "great ideas fall apart and bad ideas can go sky high." "Still, with that caveat I think Neose is off to a great start," he said. "I think the future looks real bright."

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