Chinese yeast factory boosts cancer drug production speed 1,000 times

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A research team at Zhejiang University has cracked a molecular puzzle, turning ordinary yeast into a powerful factory for an expensive cancer drug and boosting its production by a thousand times.The anticancer drug vinblastine has long been sourced exclusively from the Madagascar periwinkle plant. But it takes 2 tonnes of dried leaves to yield just 1 gram of vinblastine, making it more expensive than gold by weight. This extreme scarcity has kept the drug costly and its supply unreliable for...