Yeast can be more powerful than you think

Yeast may not be the most exciting thing in your kitchen but, for biopharmaceutical drugs, it’s the base of the pyramid.

Researchers from MIT have developed a portable biopharmaceutical production system that can produce a single dose of treatment containing a small droplet of cells in a liquid. Derived from yeast, it is meant to deliver treatments to those in areas with no medical help.

"Imagine you were on Mars or in a remote desert, without access to a full formulary. You could program the yeast to produce drugs on demand locally," said Tim Lu, an associate professor of biological engineering and electrical engineering and computer science and head of the Synthetic Biology Group at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics.

Researchers altered the yeast to be more easily genetically modified in order to produce more than one kind of treatment. Using different chemicals produces different treatment for example, estrogen β-estradiol causes the cells to be similar to the human growth hormone, when exposed to methanol, the yeast expressed the protein interferon.

"But if you could engineer a single strain, or maybe even a consortia of strains that grow together, to manufacture combinations of biologics or antibodies, that could be a very powerful way of producing these drugs at a reasonable cost," said Lu.

The cells are contained in a millimeter-scale table-top microbioreactor, containing a microfluidic chip, within the system. Liquid with the selected chemical is then put into the reactor to mix with the cell s and product a single treatment.