Biologics — If You Cannot Build It, Get Something to Build It

Some medicines cannot be built

The medicines in the previous article were very small molecules — small enough for a chemist to assemble.

Insulin is a protein: dozens of amino acids in a fixed order, folded into a fixed shape. Getting the order right is not enough; the fold has to be right too.

So you get it made for you

A cell makes proteins by following the order written in a gene. The gene is the instruction; the cell is the factory.

Which suggests the method: give a bacterium the human instruction for insulin. It does not know the instruction is borrowed. It simply reads and builds, and the insulin is collected.

These are biologics: medicines not built by chemistry but grown to order. Many modern cancer and autoimmune treatments are made this way.

Growing cells is the work

Simple to say, but the cells must be kept alive: temperature held, food supplied, waste removed, and nothing else allowed in.

Walk through such a plant and you find rows of large vessels with cells growing inside. It makes medicine, but it looks less like a chemical works than a fermentation house. The root is the same as brewing.

A little further in

What bacteria cannot do

The bacterial trick does not always work. Many human proteins need sugars attached after assembly, and bacteria do not know how; their folding differs from ours as well.

So larger proteins are made in animal cells instead — slower, fussier and far more expensive. That is why antibody medicines cost what they do.

The same medicine is never quite the same

Here is something peculiar to this field.

Editing the instruction

A step beyond having the instruction read is changing it. Tools that find one place in a gene and cut or replace it have made that far easier.

Easier is not the same as permitted. Correcting the cells of one ill person differs from editing the instruction of a child yet to be born and leaving that change in their descendants. The world is still arguing that line. Technology does not settle it.

What you would study to do this

This is not a building full of biologists.

1. Someone who designs which genes go in and out — molecular biology.
2. Someone who actually keeps the cells alive — cell culture, where good hands matter.
3. Someone who scales one vessel into a factory — bioprocess and chemical engineering.
4. Someone who verifies that what came out is what was intended — analytical chemistry and quality control.
5. Someone who handles the flood of genetic data — computing and statistics.
6. Someone who cares for the laboratory animals — veterinary and laboratory animal science.

Look again at the second line. Much of cell culture cannot be learned from papers, and a single contamination destroys weeks of work, so steady hands are prized. Even inside science there are jobs where skill outranks a degree.

The work is done at the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology in Yuseong-gu, Daejeon.

The question that remainsIf the answer to what you cannot build is to have something else build it — what have we set aside as impossible only because we have not found who to ask?