For medics on the battlefield and doctors in remote or developing parts of the world, getting rapid access to the drugs needed to treat patients can be challenging.
Biopharmaceutical drugs, which are used in a wide range of therapies including vaccines and treatments for diabetes and cancer, are typically produced in large, centralized fermentation plants. This means they must be transported to the treatment site, which can be expensive, time-consuming, and challenging to execute in areas with poor supply chains.
Now a portable production system, designed to manufacture a range of biopharmaceuticals on demand, has been developed by researchers at MIT, with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
In a paper published today in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers demonstrate that the system can be used to produce a single dose of treatment from a compact device containing a small droplet of cells in a liquid.
In this way, the system could ultimately be carried onto the battlefield and used to produce treatments at the point of care. It could also be used to manufacture a vaccine to prevent a disease outbreak in a remote village, according to senior author Tim Lu, an associate professor of biological engineering and electrical engineering and computer science, and head of the Synthetic Biology Group at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.
“Imagine you were on Mars or in a remote desert, without access to a full formulary, you could program the yeast to produce drugs on demand locally,” Lu says.
The system is based on a programmable strain of yeast, Pichia pastoris, which can be induced to express one of two therapeutic proteins when exposed to a particular chemical trigger. The researchers chose P. pastoris because it can grow to very high densities on simple and inexpensive carbon sources, and is able to express large amounts of protein.
