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CU Boulder鈥檚 International Genetically Engineered Machine team has developed a 鈥渕agic soybean鈥� that can churn out scarce pharmaceutical compounds while going easy on the environment.听

Soybeans are cheap and efficient to grow, restoring nitrogen to the soil rather than stripping it as many crops do. Using synthetic biology, Brian DeDecker, teaching associate professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, and his students devised a way to infuse the beans with genetic instructions to make ingredients like: squalene, an oil used in vaccines but typically harvested from shark livers; paclitaxel, a chemotherapy treatment normally extracted from old growth yew trees; and immune-boosting proteins accessible only through human breast milk.听

DeDecker and former student Simon Kalmus spun off a company, Seedling Biosystems, to commercialize the idea. They envision a day when soybean fields across the Midwest are dedicated to, as they put it, 鈥渂iopharming.鈥�

Photos:听Brian DeDecker with students in his lab; Brian DeDecker in a soybean field at his family farm in Illinois. Photos by: Casey A. Cass/University of baby直播app; Brian DeDecker.听