Award details

Engineering Quillaja saponin biosynthesis pathways for bio-production of QS-21

Reference	BB/R005508/1
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor Anne Osbourn
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors
Institution	John Innes Centre
Department	Metabolic Biology
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	1,223,712
Status	Completed
Type	Research Grant
Start date	03/04/2018
End date	02/07/2020
Duration	27 months

Abstract

unavailable

Summary

Plants are a rich source of drugs and other high-value compounds. Morphine was the first plant drug to be purified and sold commercially and salicylic acid the first to be chemically synthesized. However, despite these and other successes, the vast majority of plant metabolic diversity has remained untapped due to the problems of accessing source species, purifying compounds and the challenges of chemical synthesis. We have established transient plant expression technology for the rapid reconstruction of plant metabolic pathways and demonstrated that this system can be used to access gram-scale quantities of products. This technology is readily scalable and has been used for commercial production of vaccines. The engineering and production of the highly potent Quillaja adjuvant QS-21 using the Hypertrans system will provide a flagship proof of concept to demonstrate the power of this platform for accessing high-value products from plants and pave the way for a new commercial venture.

Committee	Not funded via Committee
Research Topics	Industrial Biotechnology, Pharmaceuticals, Plant Science, Synthetic Biology
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	Follow-On Fund Super (SuperFOF) [2012-2015]
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

I accept the terms and conditions of use (opens in new window)

export PDF file

back to list new search