As we look to a greener, healthier future, what can we learn from the past? Professor Rob Field, Director of the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB), walks us through the genealogy of some of the oldest innovations to those that will shape the future.
We have a rich history of finding alternative uses for everyday objects. The technique of extracting aspirin from tree bark dates back thousands of years and might be considered industrial biotechnology today. Similarly, the act of fermentation has underpinned beer production and food preservation around the world for millennia. It is a historic biotechnology.
But in the 21st century, we are exploring ways to extract useful compounds from renewable plant-based feedstocks, and turning to microbial fermentation as a means of generating designer medicines.
What can history teach us?
Traditional microbiology in the first half of the 20th century helped make penicillin a go-to antibiotic that was accessible and affordable for everyone. Scientists seeking commercial and medical profits sought new microbes that produced penicillin variants, leading to the cephalosporins, which were not susceptible to the biological processes that made them resistant to penicillin. These were slow developments, exacerbated by the rapid emergence of drug failures that required major changes in productivity.
The molecular biology revolution of the 1970s and 1980s allowed us to manipulate the genetic material of plants and bacteria, producing poppies that produce increased amounts of therapeutic opium and the antimalarial drug artemisinin, and bacteria that can produce incredible amounts of antibiotics and anticancer drugs that occur in only minute quantities in nature. The opportunity to harness these mechanisms to produce new, naturally occurring bioactive compounds is fast approaching the era of “synthetic biology.”
The MIB is at the forefront of this scientific discovery and the development of the technologies to harness and industrialise it – and was awarded the Queen’s Memorial Award in recognition of its work.
These developments provide a new generation of molecules never before found in nature, as well as a large-scale process for deploying potential drug leads for clinical evaluation, and a clean and sustainable method based on synthetic biology approaches.
This is already being seen in the work carried out by the MIB on COVID-19: for example, Professor Perdita Balan, Director of the Michael Barber Joint Centre for Mass Spectrometry, is helping to detail the prognosis of patients with COVID-19.
Additionally, spinout company Iceni is leading the way in diagnostic tests that can be performed more quickly and accurately distinguish between COVID-19 and influenza, a technology that could potentially be applied to other diseases in the future, changing the diagnostic landscape.
One challenge is scaling up production and transforming the chemical industry, which has relied heavily on petroleum-based feedstocks and chemical processes that are not necessarily environmentally friendly.
Through MIB’s Future Biomanufacturing Research Hub in Manchester, we will demonstrate how bio-based processes that harness nature’s mechanisms are flexible and scalable to produce large quantities of new molecules that are valuable to industry and society.
The future is bright, green and clean – and it’s all thanks to fundamental ideas and technologies that date back centuries.
