Abstract
One of the big success stories in synthetic biology is the re-engineering of an existing organism to produce the anti-malarial drug artemisinin. The drug is also found naturally in extracts of the plant Artemisia annua (Wormwood), but demand is far oustripping supply and extracting the drug from the plants is complex, time-consuming and expensive. In this lecture, Jay Keasling describes how he and his laboratory re-designed yeast microbes into living mini anti-malaria drug factories producing artemisinin more cheaply and efficiently. The lecture was given at the 12 May 2009 launch of the Imperial-based Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation—established in partnership with the London School of Economics and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of a science and innovation award.
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Acknowledgements
I would first like to thank the people in my laboratory who did this work over a number of years and the many more people at Amyris who worked on this project. I would also like to thank the Joint Genome Institute for doing a great deal of gene sequencing for us; and our funding sources, in particular, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which funded the last three years of science and is still funding the final stages of development for this project. Finally, I would like to thank Caitlin Cockerton and Filippa Lentzos for their help in turning my presentation into this written manuscript.
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Keasling, J. Synthetic Biology in Pursuit of Inexpensive, Effective, Anti-Malarial Drugs. BioSocieties 4, 275–282 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1017/S1745855209990147
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1745855209990147