Engineered Bacteria Produce Low Cost Drugs

Bacteria are commonly used to produce biologics, which are products like vaccines, gene therapies, and proteins that are created or synthesized from biological sources. A new technology for biologics uses engineered bacterial "swarmbots" (see below) to achieve versatile production, analysis, and purification of diverse proteins and protein complexes.

"It's a very compact process. You don't need electricity, and you don't need a centrifuge to produce and isolate these proteins," said research leader Lingchong You, a professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University. "It makes this a good platform for biomanufacturing. You have the ability to produce a certain type of medicine in a very compact format at a low cost, and it's easy to deliver. On top of that, this platform offers an easy way to produce multiple proteins simultaneously."

"This technology is incredibly versatile," added You. "That's a capability we want to take advantage of."

Engineered bacteria create biological drugs. Biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed a new platform to create biological drugs using specially-engineered bacteria, called "swarmbots," which burst and release useful proteins when they sense that their capsule is becoming too crowded. This self-contained platform, described in a research paper published in Nature Chemical Biology, could make it easier for researchers to create, analyze, and purify diverse biologics for use in small-scale biomanufacturing.

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