Turning point for team came from cross-disciplinary collaboration, including working across plant biochemistry, synthetic biology and protein engineering.

A research team at Zhejiang University has cracked a molecular puzzle, turning ordinary yeast into a powerful factory for an expensive cancer drug and boosting its production by a thousand times. The anticancer drug vinblastine has long been sourced exclusively from the Madagascar periwinkle plant. But it takes 2 tonnes of dried leaves to yield just 1 gram of vinblastine, making it more expensive than gold by weight. This extreme scarcity has kept the drug costly and its supply unreliable for…

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