By Beth Mole
NORTH BETHESDA, Md. — Chemists are struggling to develop new drugs these days — and biologists may have just the pill for that.
By tapping natural enzymes and tweaking microbes, researchers may find and make new drugs more easily, says biological engineer Vikramaditya Yadav of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Yadav says he has developed a method to make a complicated anticancer drug using plant enzymes and E. coli bacteria, a process he has dubbed “biosynthonics.” He presented his work July 15 at the Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference.