Did you know that nowadays bacteria and mammalian cells, especially hamster cells, produce a wide range of drugs? And who tells them to do so? The answer is the four-letter code of DNA. Biotechnologists spend a lot of time to explore natural DNA sequences of different organisms for production. The Chinese Hamster is a mammalian system and suits well for cell factories because of its similarity to human cells. However, for a long time the knowledge about the hamster DNA sequence had many gaps that needed to be investigated.

Co-author: Martin Walpot

In the development of drugs and pharmaceutical compounds, expensive tests are necessary, to know, which metabolic by-products and side-effects could emerge and to ensure that drugs are working effectively and in a safe manner. Human-like CYP450 enzymes, which mimic the same activities happening in the human body, are new, excellent biocatalytic tools to screen side effects outside the human body. They also enable the timely production of reasonable amounts of active pharmaceutical ingredients. Used as biocatalysts in industrial applications, new CYP450 enzymes, developed in the EU-project ROBOX, have the potential to speed up drug development, enhance pharmaceutical safety and to innovate chemical markets such as flavour-, fragrance or food industries.

The complex tumour structure makes the treatment of breast cancer a medical challenge. A promising, novel selenium-based breast cancer nanoparticle therapy, which is topic of the EU-project Neosetac, could change that: It has proved to boost the active agent delivery and assure it’s active only in the target tissue while also bringing the suggestion of reduced side effects. The project findings are expected to increase the efficiency of future chemotherapies and prevent recurrence of the cancer after complete remission.

Have you ever wondered, why it often takes many years until a new drug is available at your local pharmacy? One of the reasons is that the pharmaceutical industry wants to make sure that the drug is not only effective but also doesn’t produce toxic breakdown products that lead to undesireable side effects. Therefore, many time-consuming and not seldomly expensive tests are required to know precisely, which possible metabolic by-products could emerge. In a next step, the industry is producing such derivates to test them thoroughly for their side-effects, ensuring one goal: the patients health and wellbeing. 

Biosensors may soon facilitate the analysis of a patient’s entire red blood cell antigen repertoire. In the form of diagnostic test strips, they could make the analysis swift and location-independent. This could have enormous potential not only in medical diagnosis, but also for environmental analysis if extended to other analytes.

Microorganisms play a crucial role for the health and well-being of higher organisms. Host-specific microbial communities of varying complexity form the so-called microbiota. It can consist of several thousand microbial species and includes bacteria, archaea and fungi. These microorganisms exchange a plethora of metabolites with their hosts and can modulate their functioning. Such interactions equally affect humans, animals and plants. This provides us with novel strategies to counteract various diseases and increase the resistance of higher organisms towards abiotic and biotic stresses by modulating the microbiota.

The body of a human adult consists of 10¹⁴ or 100 trillion of cells, which have specific tasks to fulfil. As a reaction to biological signals or environmental cues, cells can start to move. Many questions about cell migration still remain unclear. The acib researchers Christian Jungreuthmayer and Jürgen Zanghellini were involved in developing a micro-device, which mechanically induces defined injuries to analyse microfluidic migration and wound healing.

Enzymes are the tiny helpers of industrial biotechnology. Despite their microscopic size, they need to be tough and diligent because we want them to catalyze a broad range of reactions, ideally with the speed of light for ever after. In reality, however, many enzymes are like sensitive creatures, who need most careful attention and special treats to get their nicest behavior. Otherwise they might fade away like a tender flower in the blinking sun… and send the biotechnologists into terrible trouble. One strategy to find frugal enzymes is to look at thermophilic organisms. They sometimes harbor a treasure of more stable proteins because they are used to withstand somewhat unfriendly conditions such as high temperatures.

Following our articles on the beneficial roles of complex microbial communities and ways to analyze them, we continue to explore this groundbreaking research field. Here we shed light on reasons why microbiome research has become so popular and why it is still gaining ground.

There are a multitude of challenges associated with the production of next-generation biopharmaceuticals and vaccines. To be effective as a public health tool, vaccines for example are increasingly administered in form of a combination of more than one component and produced in large scale by means of seed viruses. These are living pathogens that multiply in cells from chicken eggs. The rule of thumb „one vaccine dose per egg“ means that the number of vaccines is limited to 150 to 200 million available eggs worldwide. Formerly used alternative platforms – such as vaccine production in cell cultures (e.g. mammalian cells) – also have the disadvantage of instability. A new platform technology for the production of the most diverse proteins in an optimised process could be the answer.