Synthetic biology for pharmaceutical drug discovery

Synthetic biology for pharmaceutical drug discovery

Synthetic biology (SB) is an emerging discipline, which is slowly reorienting the field of drug discovery. For thousands of years, living organisms such as plants were the major source of human medicines. The difficulty in resynthesizing natural products, however, often turned pharmaceutical industries away from this rich source for human medicine. More recently, progress on transformation thro...

Systems Theory for Pharmaceutical Drug Discovery

Systems Theory for Pharmaceutical Drug Discovery by Anil Jayanti Aswani Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering-Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and the Designated Emphasis in Computational and Genomic Biology University of California, Berkeley Professor Claire Tomlin, Chair Biological networks are comprised of thousands of interacting components, and these networks have complicated pat...

Synthetic biology of antimicrobial discovery.

Antibiotic discovery has a storied history. From the discovery of penicillin by Sir Alexander Fleming to the relentless quest for antibiotics by Selman Waksman, the stories have become like folklore used to inspire future generations of scientists. However, recent discovery pipelines have run dry at a time when multidrug-resistant pathogens are on the rise. Nature has proven to be a valuable re...

Yeast Synthetic Biology Platform Generates Novel Chemical Structures as Scaffolds for Drug Discovery

Synthetic biology has been heralded as a new bioengineering platform for the production of bulk and specialty chemicals, drugs, and fuels. Here, we report for the first time a series of 74 novel compounds produced using a combinatorial genetics approach in baker's yeast. Based on the concept of "coevolution" with target proteins in an intracellular primary survival assay, the identified, mostly...

A New Pharmaceutical Commons: Transforming Drug Discovery