‘Magic beans’ produce ingredients for vaccines, cancer treatments and more

Brian DeDecker in a soybean field at his family farm in Illinois. Photo courtesy of Brian DeDecker.

CU Boulder’s International Genetically Engineered Machine team has developed a “magic soybean” that can churn out scarce pharmaceutical compounds while going easy on the environment.

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.

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, “biopharming.”