Publications

Abstract : Production of recombinant pharmaceutical protein is a multibillion-dollar industry and plays a crucial role in treatment of many diseases. Among the several potent microbial production systems, yeast offers several advantages in production of pharmaceutically important proteins due to its unicellular nature, easy gene manipulation, cost-effectiveness and fast growth and incorporates post-translational modifications in heterologous proteins. Saccharomyces cerevisiae is the widely used heterologous host for the production of medically important proteins and drugs; however, several non-conventional yeast species including Hansenula polymorpha, Pichia pastoris, and Yarrowia lipolytica are also gaining much attention as alternative heterologous hosts for the industrial production of therapeutic proteins. In this chapter, most recent advances in glycoengineering of yeast for successful therapeutic pharmaceutical production, current progress in humanization of yeast and various interventions in the secretory mechanisms and pathways in yeast for the improvement of the production of pharmaceutical proteins are overviewed. In addition, emerging genetic, omics, systems and synthetic biology tools and other technologies to enhance the efficiency of yeast pharmaceutical proteins are precisely discussed. The use of synthetic biology tools in yeast for the production of pharmaceuticals is clearly entering a new phase right now. Combination of yeast systems biology data with synthetic biology will open new vistas to better production, improved glycosylation and secretory mechanism. The application of currently available synthetic biology tools like CRISPR/Cas9 in yeast pathway engineering is also discussed.