Chinese yeast factory boosts cancer drug production speed 1,000 times

A research team at Zhejiang University (ZJU) has revolutionized the production of an expensive cancer drug, vinblastine, by engineering ordinary yeast. This breakthrough has increased the drug's production by an astounding thousand times, making it more affordable and reliable. Vinblastine has traditionally been sourced from the Madagascar periwinkle plant, but the process required a massive amount of dried leaves to yield just a gram of the drug, making it prohibitively expensive.

This scarcity has kept the drug costly and its supply unreliable for decades. The breakthrough came from a team led by ZJU professor Lian Jiazhang, who collaborated with researchers from the University of New Brunswick in Canada and Westlake University in China. They engineered brewer's yeast to produce catharanthine, the direct precursor to vinblastine, inside a fermenter.

This achievement is nearly 1,000 times higher than any previously published global figure. The key to this success was the discovery of a gene called CAD2, which encodes the protein VinBLAST. This protein acts as a molecular bridge, connecting the upstream enzyme to the downstream one, skipping the need to transport the unstable intermediate, and accelerating the reaction by more than 24-fold.

This innovative approach has opened the door to the industrial-scale production of vinblastine and related alkaloids, potentially making these life-saving drugs more accessible and affordable.