NORTHEASTERN

"Dr. George D. Yancopoulos, chief scientific officer of Regeneron, said the crisis had pointed up shortcomings in biodefense. “Nobody is really prepared,” he said. “Nobody in the world has rapid response capabilities.”—New York Times, January 2015

Northeastern is working to standardize protein production in microalgae. Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, the workhorse of algae research, is an attractive chassis for several reasons. Its primary carbon source is CO₂, it rapidly divides, and it’s a capable of complex post-translational modifications.

Microalgae are relatively inexpensive to scale, yet have all the production capabilities of other Eukaryotic organisms (di-sulfide bonds and glycosylation). This capability could be exploited to treat human disease. For example, there was a shortage of an “antibody-cocktail” during the Ebola outbreak.