Biologists Engineer Algae to Make Complex Anti-Cancer Designer Drug
Date: 12.12.2012
Biologists at UC San Diego have succeeded in genetically engineering algae to produce a complex and expensive human therapeutic drug used to treat cancer.
Their achievement, detailed in a paper in this week's early online issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, opens the door for making these and other "designer" proteins in larger quantities and much more cheaply than can now be made from mammalian cells.
Their method could even be used to make novel complex designer drugs that can't be produced in any other systems--drugs that could be used to treat cancer or other human diseases in new ways.
The advance is the culmination of seven years of work in Mayfield's laboratory to demonstrate that Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a green alga used widely in biology laboratories as a genetic model organism can produce a wide range of human therapeutic proteins in greater quantity and more cheaply than bacteria or mammalian cells.
