I knew that many of the drugs we use today were first identified in plants. What I didn’t know was in how many cases those plants are still the only source of the drug because scientists haven’t figured out how to make them in the lab.
If the only source of an effective drug is a plant that is rare, endangered, or hard to grow in the lab, that's obviously a problem.
Elizabeth Sattely, PhD, a Stanford chemical engineer, recently tackled this problem for a popular cancer drug that comes from a Himalayan plant called the Mayapple. She managed to identify the ten drug-making enzymes in the Mayapple and insert those genes into a much easier-to-grow plant. In a story about the work, which appears today in the journal Science, I wrote:
[It] could lead to new ways of modifying the natural pathways to produce derivative drugs that are safer or more effective than the natural source.
"A big promise of synthetic biology is to be able to engineer pathways that occur in nature, but if we don't know what the proteins are, then we can't even start on that endeavor," said Sattely, who is also a member of the interdisciplinary institutes Stanford Bio-X and Stanford ChEM-H.
Sattely said this is really a first step. Ultimately she’d like to get those same enzymes into yeast, which can produce high volumes of drugs in big laboratory vats.
Video by Amy Adams
