Manufacturing drugs and clean fuels with microbial refineries | Jay Keasling

Summary

Jay Keasling describes engineering microbes to make medicines, chemicals, materials, and fuels from renewable feedstocks rather than petroleum. He presents the technology as a possible response to rising demand for food and energy, climate change, and drug resistance.

A microbial biorefinery uses microbes to convert sugars from renewable biomass into useful products. Genetic engineering allows genes from different organisms to be combined in a microbe, enabling it to produce substances it would not ordinarily make. Keasling says that when fuels made from renewable biomass are burned, their carbon returns to the atmosphere without adding net carbon, unlike fossil fuels.

Examples discussed

• Artemisinin: Keasling’s laboratory transferred genes from the plant Artemisia into brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), enabling the yeast to produce the antimalarial drug. Sanofi later marketed artemisinin-based combination therapies. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the project took about 10 years and $50 million.
• Advanced biofuels: Researchers used genes associated with hydrocarbons found on plant leaves to engineer microbes to produce fuels. Keasling says these fuels are used in planes and buses.
• Other engineered products: A DuPont project used E. coli to produce a material for carpet fibers. Keasling cites a cost of about $130 million and a duration of 15 years.

Keasling says engineering biology has been expensive and slow because it has often relied on individual researchers manually designing, building, and testing organisms. He describes a shift toward automated biofoundries, where robots build and test computer-designed biology and machine learning helps analyze the results.

Development path

1. Researchers design biological systems using computer-aided design.
2. Robots build and test the designs.
3. Machine learning analyzes the results and guides the next design cycle.
4. In a future model, distributed foundries could create designs for many organizations, share learning, and supply biological components.
5. Further ahead, a desktop “3D printer for biology” could potentially build microbes or plants from designs.

Potential applications include improving crop productivity, engineering gut microbiomes to improve access to drugs or produce them, developing new fuels and chemicals, and creating new classes of antibiotics to address drug resistance. Keasling closes by raising questions about who should have access to these capabilities and how far biological engineering should go, including whether humans could be “printed.”

Researchers and sources featured

• Jay Keasling — Speaker and researcher whose laboratory developed the artemisinin-producing yeast example.
• Paul — Mentioned by first name only.
• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — Funder of the artemisinin project.
• Sanofi — Marketed artemisinin-based combination therapies.
• DuPont — Conducted the carpet-fiber project using E. coli.