Science, Space and Technology News 2024
UC Berkeley scientists have innovated a cost-effective, yeast-based production method for QS-21, enhancing vaccine efficacy and reducing reliance on traditional, environmentally harmful extraction methods.
Yet, one of the strongest adjuvants, an extract of the Chilean soap bark plant, is so difficult to produce that it costs several hundred million dollars per kilogram ., and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists have now wielded the power of synthetic biology to produce the active ingredient of soap bark, a molecule called QS-21, in yeast.
“During the pandemic, public health officers were really worried about QS-21 adjuvant availability because that only comes from one tree,” said Jay Keasling, UC Berkeley professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and senior faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab. “From a world health perspective, there’s a lot of need for an alternative source of this adjuvant.”
Not long after alum was discovered to boost the effectiveness of vaccines, a group of soap-like molecules was found to do the same. By the 1960s, researchers had focused on an extract of the Chilean soapbark tree that strongly activates different components of the immune system to amplify the effect of giving a vaccine antigen alone.
Adding the eight sugars proved challenging, as did balancing unsuspected interactions among enzymes in yeast. All this had to be accomplished without throwing off critical metabolic pathways that are needed for yeast growth. “It was a great collaboration, because as soon as she’d get a new gene in the pathway, they’d send it our way, and we’d put it into yeast,” Keasling said. “It was also good for her, because she got a test of whether her tobacco assay was telling her the right thing.” by which the soapbark tree makes QS-21, reconstituted in tobacco. Unfortunately, tobacco is a test bed for plant chemistry, but not a scalable way to produce a chemical compound.
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