Vaccine-enhancing plant extract could be mass produced in yeast

Ryan Nett is in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.

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Plants have long been a source of medicines, including painkillers, anti-cancer drugs, treatments for neurological disorders and even vaccine adjuvants1 — compounds that increase the efficacy of vaccines by enhancing the immune system’s response to a molecule that is recognized as an antigen. However, obtaining plant-derived molecules is frequently challenging. Extracting and isolating them directly from plants can result in low yields and damage to ecosystems, and synthesizing complex plant molecules chemically is difficult and often expensive2. Writing in Nature, Liu et al.3 provide a promising solution to this problem by synthesizing a potent plant-derived vaccine adjuvant in engineered strains of yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) — an easy-to-grow microorganism.

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Nature 629, 760-761 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01210-5

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The author declares no competing interests.

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