With the use of a technology created by The University of Texas in Austin, the process of improving drug development from modified bacteria will soon happen.
Researchers have been looking for solutions to reduce the cost and environmental impact of pharmaceutical manufacturers' present procedures, many of which rely on either plant crops or petroleum, for decades.
According to Phys.org, employing microorganisms has been recommended as a viable organic substitute. However, it is challenging and time-consuming to find therapeutic compounds and optimize their synthesis; it might take months at a time.
The UT Austin team describes a biosensor system built from E. coli bacteria in a new publication published this week in Nature Chemical Biology. This system can be modified to detect various medicinal chemicals precisely and in a matter of hours.
Researchers Try to Hijack Bacteria to Improve Drug Development
Andrew Ellington, a professor of molecular biosciences and corresponding author on the paper, said they were figuring out how to give bacteria "senses" like olfactory receptors or taste receptors to detect various compounds they might make, UT News reported.
Many of the medications we use are formulated with plant-based components (for example, morphine, the narcotic painkiller that comes from poppies, or galantamine, a drug treatment for dementia that comes from daffodils). These plants require water and land to cultivate the crops, making the drug extraction process difficult and resource-intensive. Supply chains are prone to interruption. Additionally, drought, fire, and floods may all harm crops.
Synthetic chemistry used to create comparable medicinal components has its own set of issues because it depends on wasteful petroleum and petroleum-based goods.
A simple, cost-effective, and sustainable replacement is bacteria. It is simple to alter bacteria's genetic material so that they may be used in medication manufacturing plants. The biological systems of the bacteria are used in a procedure known as biosynthesis to manufacture certain chemicals as a byproduct of cellular activity. And microorganisms have a rapid rate of replication. They only need sugar to do the task.
How to Make Drugs Using Bacteria
Until recently, producers haven't had a rapid means to compare many strains of modified bacteria to find the ones that can produce large amounts of the desired medication at commercial rates. With present technology, it can take weeks or months to accurately analyze the hundreds of modified strains that are on route to a good producer, but the new biosensors can do it in just one day.
"There are currently no biosensors for most plant metabolites," said Simon d'Oelsnitz, a research scientist in the Department of Molecular Biosciences and the first author of the paper, in a Eurekalert report. "With this technique, it should be possible to create biosensors for a wide range of medicines."
The biosensors created by d'Oelsnitz, Ellington, and colleagues quickly and precisely estimate how much of a certain chemical a particular bacterial strain is generating. The group created biosensors for several popular medications, including vasodilators and cough suppressants, which are used to alleviate muscular spasms.
Wantae Kim and Yan Jessie Zhang, X-ray crystallographers, captured molecular pictures of the biosensors to demonstrate how strongly they bind to their companion medication. The medication glows when the biosensor picks it up.
The scientists also built their own bacteria to generate a substance that can be found in several FDA-approved pharmaceuticals while using biosensors to monitor product production, thus demonstrating how the industry may swiftly embrace biosensors to optimize chemical manufacturing.
Although not the first biosensor, d'Oelsnitz said the method enables them to be created more quickly and effectively making it possible to generate more medications through biosynthesis.
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