Scientists Engineer Algae To Produce New Targeted Cancer Therapy
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (green algae) Dartmouth Electron Microscope FacilityNext-generation cancer therapies are notoriously expensive. But maybe not for long. If traditional cancer therapies like chemotherapy are the WMDs of medicine--powerful, indiscriminate killers--targeted drug therapies are the assassins, trained to seek out and destroy enemy cancer cells, one at a time. Scientists recognize the clear advantage of the assassin approach, of course, and have successfully engineered several targeted cancer-killing drugs over the past few decades. The problem is, assassins ain't cheap. A single course of targeted drug therapy can cost upwards of $100,000. That's largely because the drugs take a lot of effort to create--scientists have to first grow human antibodies capable of recognizing enemy cells, and then equip those cells with a weapon by attaching them to toxic molecules. The process is, apparently, as hard and time-consuming as it sounds. But recently, a group of scientists at University of California,...