Elizabeth Sattely Browse All Authors Top 3 quotes by Elizabeth Sattely Producing plant-derived drugs in easy-to-grow plants or baker's yeast in many cases will be a much more efficient way to make these drugs, this is currently being done for artemisinin (a malaria drug derived from the sweet wormwood plant), and will likely be the way we make morphine (derived from poppies) in the future. Elizabeth Sattely healthcare Mimicking the way nature makes these molecules is a promising alternative, but to do that we need to find the genes. This can be a major challenge because plant genomes can be very large and genes are hard to find. Elizabeth Sattely healthcare We used these genes to engineer a wild relative of tobacco to make the drug precursor and think we could also use these genes to make the drug in other easy-to-grow organisms such as yeast. Elizabeth Sattely healthcare
