A portable production system was designed by researchers at MIT, the idea of this innovative system readiness for manufacturing a range of biopharmaceuticals on demand. 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.
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Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a new portable device that lets doctors create drugs on demand in single doses.
The research project has received funds from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and a research paper detailing it was published recently in the Nature Communications.
“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”, says Lu.
New system’s invention and developing became a reality because of funding from DARPA, such a system is extremely useful for the medics on the battlefields.
It can also be used to produce a vaccine to prevent a disease outbreak in a remote village.
The production system uses a programmable strain of yeast, Pichia pastoris, which produces two proteins used for disease therapy. The researchers chose P. pastoris because it can grow to very high densities on simple and affordable carbon sources, and is able to express large amounts of protein. Exposure of the yeast to methanol, on the other hand, expressed interferon, which belongs to a family of substances that are naturally produced by the immune system and used to treat various forms of cancer such as melanoma and leukemia, as well as virus infections.
In this case, the yeast is held in a microbioreactor, which contains a microfluidic chip (also developed at MIT).
The portable drug factory includes a reactor where the yeast gets combined with the chemical.
By pressurizing the gas above this membrane, the researchers are able to gently massage the liquid droplet to ensure its contents are fully mixed together.
Conditions such as oxygen levels, temperature, and pH are monitored by the device within the microfluidic chip to ensure the environment is at optimum levels for cell growth.
If the yeast is required to produce a different protein, the liquid is simply flushed through a filter, leaving the cells behind. The first is a system engineered to kick out multiple therapeutic proteins in response to programmed (chemical) cues, while the second is a millimeter-scale microfluidics production platform for actually producing the biologic end product.
The research team of Pablo Perez-Pinera; Ningren Han; Sara Cleto; Jicong Cao; Oliver Purcell; Kartik A. Shah; Kevin Lee; Rajeev Ram, and Timothy K. Lu are now working to apply the reactor in combination with treatments that require antibodies, a feat that could slash the cost of expensive therapeutics.
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The system is capable of producing two biologic drugs from one strain of yeast, and near-single-dose production (not exactly single-dose at this point) is possible in under 24 hours, even with limited infrastructure.
