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ARTICLE | Emerging Company Profile

RecombinoGen: Recombinatorial biosynthesis

September 26, 2005 7:00 AM UTC

Microbes such as Streptomycesbacteria have been a rich source of medicines, including antibiotics, cancer drugs and immunosuppressants. But with the drug discovery potential of pharma's natural product libraries becoming exhausted, scientists have been searching for ways to discover new compounds or get the bugs to make innovative semi-synthetic drugs. RecombinoGen Ltd. is using its High Frequency Recombination technology to create strains of microbes capable of making novel compounds.

In marked contrast to the conventional biosynthesis of peptides and proteins, in which amino acids are added at the ribosome based on the mRNA template, HFR synthesizes microbial peptides in a sequence of enzyme-controlled processes, in which each amino acid is added as a result of the specificity of the enzyme involved. ...