Engineering an Artificial Taxol Biosynthetic Pathway from Baccatin III in Yeast.
Gou Y, Jiang B, Jiang X, Zhang Y, Chen B
Medicinal Plants
Pacific yew trees, once stripped from old-growth forests to harvest Taxol bark at the rate of six trees per cancer patient, may face far less harvesting pressure if yeast fermentation tanks can do what those slow-growing trees once had to.
Taxol is one of the best cancer drugs we have, but it's incredibly hard and expensive to make because it comes from a rare tree and involves a complicated chemical recipe with dozens of steps. Scientists have now programmed yeast—like bread yeast—to follow an artificial version of that recipe, producing a key ingredient of Taxol inside a fermentation tank. This is a big step toward brewing this cancer medicine the way we brew beer, rather than harvesting it from slow-growing trees.
Key Findings
Researchers constructed an artificial biosynthetic pathway in yeast starting from baccatin III, a precursor compound, bypassing the need to replicate the full native plant pathway.
The native Taxol pathway has resisted full decipherment for over 50 years due to its complex regulatory network, but recent advances finally clarified it enough to attempt engineering.
Differences between plant and microbial cellular systems required systematic metabolic engineering to overcome multiple production bottlenecks that blocked direct pathway transfer.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists engineered yeast to produce a key building block of Taxol, a powerful cancer-fighting drug, using an artificial biosynthetic pathway—potentially making this life-saving medicine cheaper and easier to manufacture at scale.
Abstract Preview
Paclitaxel (Taxol) is among the most successful natural anticancer agents, yet its manufacturing still relies on expensive semisynthetic methods carried out under harsh alkaline conditions. Deciphe...
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Taxus brevifolia, the Pacific yew or western yew, is a species of tree in the yew family Taxaceae native to the Pacific Northwest of North America. It is a small evergreen conifer, thriving in moisture and otherwise tending to take the form of a shrub.