Scientists have discovered how to use yeast to produce human proteins such as insulin. Tillman Gerngross, a professor of biochemical engineering at Dartmouth College and chief scientific officer at privately owned biotech company GlycoFi, and colleagues say their techniques means that producing human proteins could be as simple as brewing beer. In order to make yeast capable of producing human proteins Gerngross and his colleagues humanized the yeast Pichia pastoris by adding five human genes to it. Tests showed that his effectively turned the yeast into a human protein-making machine. The new method has several advantages over other methods in that it takes significantly less time to produce proteins and gives a higher yield, and thus is more cost effective. into a human protein machine, which Gerngross believes “has the potential to revolutionize the way therapeutic proteins are made &endash; better, cheaper, faster, safer &endash; and offer a level of control over the quality of the end product that has never existed before.” Scientists are extremely excited about these proteins as, theoretically, any disease that is caused by a faulty gene should be treatable with a therapeutic protein.
SOURCE/REFERENCE: Science 2003;301:1171.
