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. Read more here.
Study mentioned: Tran M, et al. PNAS Plus: Production of unique immunotoxin cancer therapeutics in algal chloroplasts. PNAS 2012 ; published ahead of print December 10, 2012.
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