Biologists Engineer Algae to Make Complex Anti-Cancer ‘Designer’ Drug

Biologists Engineer Algae to Make Complex Anti-Cancer ‘Designer’ Drug
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.

“Because we can make the exact same drug in algae, we have the opportunity to drive down the price down dramatically,” said Stephen Mayfield, a professor of biology at UC San Diego and director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology or SD-CAB, a consortium of research institutions that is also working to develop new biofuels from algae.
[link to ucsdnews.ucsd.edu]