title: Synthetic biology for pharmaceutical drug discovery.
abstract: Synthetic biology (SB) is an emerging discipline, which is slowly reorienting the field of drug discovery. For thousands of years, living organisms such as plants were the major source of human medicines. The difficulty in resynthesizing natural products, however, often turned pharmaceutical industries away from this rich source for human medicine. More recently, progress on transformation through genetic manipulation of biosynthetic units in microorganisms has opened the possibility of in-depth exploration of the large chemical space of natural products derivatives. Success of SB in drug synthesis culminated with the bioproduction of artemisinin by microorganisms, a tour de force in protein and metabolic engineering. Today, synthetic cells are not only used as biofactories but also used as cell-based screening platforms for both target-based and phenotypic-based approaches. Engineered genetic circuits in synthetic cells are also used to decipher disease mechanisms or drug mechanism of actions and to study cell-cell communication within bacteria consortia. This review presents latest developments of SB in the field of drug discovery, including some challenging issues such as drug resistance and drug toxicity.
authors.affiliation: Bioinformation Research Laboratory, Sup'Biotech, Villejuif, France.
authors.forename: Jean-Yves
authors.initials: JY
authors.lastname: Trosset
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Life Sciences, SYNBIOCHEM Centre, Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK ; Department of Experimental and Health Sciences (DCEXS), Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB), Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Carbonell
mesh_terms: D000900:Anti-Bacterial Agents / Q000737:chemistry / Q000378:metabolism / Q000494:pharmacology; D001419:Bacteria / Q000166:cytology / Q000187:drug effects / Q000378:metabolism; D001688:Biological Products / Q000737:chemistry / Q000378:metabolism / Q000494:pharmacology; D055808:Drug Discovery / Q000639:trends*; D006801:Humans; D015202:Protein Engineering; D058615:Synthetic Biology / Q000639:trends*
chemical_list: D000900:Anti-Bacterial Agents; D001688:Biological Products
keywords: drug resistance; metabolic engineering; natural products; plant synthetic biology; synthetic quorum sensing