This crop may contain a COVID-19 treatment and be a boon for Kentucky farmers
Patrick Perry was already sweating through his shirt when he climbed in his tractor Wednesday morning at Spindletop Farm in Lexington.
He’d arrived before sunrise, in part to beat the heat, but mostly to prepare for the daily task at hand: transplanting half an acre’s worth of Artemisia annua seedlings in hopes that, once they’re harvested, they’ll be used to treat COVID-19.
Perry is research coordinator for the University of Kentucky’s Tobacco Research and Development Center, which operates Spindletop — a sprawling 2,200 acre farm on the city’s outskirts.
Using Artemisia annua plants, also known as sweet wormwood, that Perry and his team harvested last year, UK is awaiting approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin clinical trials to see if purified plant compounds and its leaves — dried and steeped in either tea or coffee — can treat someone with underlying health issues who contracts the virus.
When tested in the lab, the plant leaves, historically proven to have anti-viral qualities, showed “early signs in the lab of inhibiting COVID-19,” said Dr. Susanne Arnold, professor of medicine, radiation and associate director for clinical translation at UK’s Markey Cancer Center.
“We’re trying to make people remain asymptomatic, or if they’re symptomatic, not develop a more severe form of the disease,” Arnold said.
COVID-19 infections are soaring across the country, pushing many states to re-shutter businesses and to mandate masks, since there’s not yet a vaccine or treatment for the highly contagious disease. In recent days, Kentucky, too, has begun reporting an uptick in new infections, pushing Gov. Andy Beshear on Thursday to follow suit and mandate the wearing of facial coverings in public places. Statewide, the total number of cases exceeds 18,000 and more than 600 people have died.
Testing the Artemisia annua plant as a possible experimental therapy for people sick with COVID-19 is one of a handful of clinical trials currently underway at UK, though it’s the only one involving a plant cultivated in Kentucky farm fields.
The Artemisia annua plant originated in Asia, but lucky for Kentucky, its growing process is “very similar to tobacco,” Perry said as he cradled one of the seedlings Wednesday morning next to a flat-bed trailer carrying hundreds of others.
Like Artemisia annua, tobacco seeds like to be nurtured in greenhouses before the seedlings are transplanted to a field; both plants’ crop cycles last about 120 days; both require the same type of machinery for cultivation, and both plants are grown for their leaves, which need to be dried once harvested.
Perfecting this growth cycle and discerning the most effective Artemisia variety to treat COVID-19 is Perry’s job in this farm-to-therapy process. “Essentially what we’re trying to do is learn as much as possible about growing the plant using our production system to prepare Kentucky farmers in the event [there’s a] need for rapid growth expansion,” he said.
In other words, if the clinical trials are promising, more will need to be grown and fast. And the university will need to tap into a network of farmers across the state to help.
‘Few, if any, side effects’
Dr. Jill Kolesar, a professor at UK’s College of Pharmacy and co-leader of the Drug Development Program at Markey Cancer Center, is a top researcher in these clinical trials at UK and partnering with chemists at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany to do so.
Unlike with other drugs being tested for their efficacy against COVID-19 in human trials, with Artemisia annua, “there are few, if any, side effects,” Dr. Peter Seeberger of the Max Planck Institute said in late June.
“These drugs show very good safety profiles and even are used in very small children,” he said.
The trial will test 60 people within a few days of being diagnosed with COVID-19. It’s imperative to start treatments during this time, before the virus replicates and enters its inflammatory phase, when it starts to damage the lungs and increases one’s risk of blood clots.
“We’re trying to catch it before it [progresses] to the organ damage that causes people to die,” Arnold said. “Success would be to keep the majority of people from worsening their symptoms.” If that happens, “they will eventually be cured of the virus.”
The ideal candidate is one who’s most likely to develop severe symptoms and faces the greatest risk of death.
“We’re targeting people who are at high risk for a bad COVID-19 infection,” Kolesar said. At high risk could mean, “if they have cancer, if they have heart failure or if they’re a bit older.”
Three times a day for two weeks, each will be prescribed to drink 450 milligrams-worth of the Artemisia-infused coffee, or 425 milligrams in tea — the equivalent of two tea bags.
For the crowd isolating at home with the virus, the goal is to see if the treatments keep their symptoms at bay enough to avoid hospitalization. And for those already in the hospital, the aim is to “prevent their COVID-19 from getting so bad that they need to go to an ICU,” Kolesar said.
‘Whatever it takes to make a living’
Over at least the next six weeks, Perry’s acre of seedlings will mature into larger, conical fern-like bushes, “almost like Christmas trees,” growing as tall as six-and-a-half feet. Different artemisia varieties will be propagated using an array of agronomic treatments before they’re harvested and analyzed to see which combination produced the best results.
About a month from now, Perry and his team will start taking weekly leaf samples “to map out the medicine content of the plant, that way we can better, more accurately predict when the optimal harvest time will be,” he said.
Similar to hemp, Artemisia annua is triggered into reproductive growth when the day hits a certain length, causing the plant to flower. When that happens, the active compound within the plant that researchers are trying to tap “drops off significantly,” Perry said. But right before this reproductive peak, the amount of the active compound hits its high. That’s the best time to harvest, Perry said.
His goal is to have honed in on an ideal variety and growing protocols by the time researchers have a clear idea of whether the clinical trials were successful. If so, it will set the stage for a larger, randomized trial with potentially hundreds of people participating, Arnold said.
Using Artemisia for medicinal purposes is not a new concept. In fact, it’s a very old one, first used thousands of years ago in traditional Chinese medicine to treat infectious diseases, among other ailments. Most notably, the compound Artemesinin was discovered in the 1970s by Chinese Professor Tu Youyou as a treatment for Malaria.
As a starting point, Youyou referred to those ancient Chinese texts, which showed that sweet wormwood had been used around 400 A.D. to treat fever, a symptom of Malaria. Youyou won a Nobel Prize in 2015 for her discovery.
Kolesar and the team at UK are after that same anti-malarial compound for the clinical trial to treat COVID-19. It’s being used in a separate study Kolesar is also working on to gauge its efficacy as a treatment for ovarian cancer.
Both studies are in collaboration with ArtemiLife, which sells Artemisia-infused coffee and tea. The Pennsylvania-based agriculture and herbal supplement company has partnered with UK for the last three years to not only grow the crop for its therapeutic potential, but to test its growth viability as a tobacco understudy for local farmers.
Adam Maust, CEO of ArtemiLife, said he’s heard from close to 100 farmers across Kentucky interested in growing the crop, even though most have no experience growing it.
“For us, it’s really unique: farmers who’ve never seen this plant before are able to transition to this crop without a huge lift at the end of the day,” he said, highlighting its likeness to tobacco.
Gary Shell, 64, was one of those farmers when he started growing Artemisia for Maust’s company two years ago on his Lancaster farm, where he’s worked his whole adult life. Shell’s farm is one of two Kentucky farms currently contracted by ArtemiLife. The other is in Georgetown.
“Not one, single crop is going to be a replacement for tobacco, but [Artemisia annua] could be a supplement to other crops,” Shell said. He was born on the farm he now works and owns, and he grew some of the seedlings Perry put in the ground on Wednesday.
Shell used to grow 180 acres of tobacco before he started growing industrial hemp, but he’s since stopped growing both. He started growing Artemisia two years ago and now has “several” acres of it. ArtemiLife asked him not to reveal specific acreage.
Shell has faith in the viability of the crop and thinks other farmers would, too. But Artemisia annua is still new to the market, which means, “it has to be developed from a hobby crop to an agronomic crop, kind of like what we did with industrial hemp,” Shell said.
Once that happens, “I would grow more, and I have a lot of neighbors that would grow more,” he said. “We’re farmers; we’ll do whatever it takes to make a living.”
This story was originally published July 10, 2020 at 1:58 PM.
