Jay Keasling
FameRank: 4

"Jay D. Keasling" is a Professor of Chemical engineering and Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Associate Laboratory Director for Biosciences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and chief executive officer of the Joint BioEnergy Institute. He is considered one of the foremost authorities in synthetic biology, especially in the field of metabolic engineering.

More Jay Keasling on Wikipedia.

The reason that the drug is very expensive is because it's produced in minute quantities in the plant, so it takes lot of plant material to get enough drug to treat one patient.

This process is highly dependent on the fact that the functions of promiscuous proteins can be altered with just a small number of amino acid substitutions, a property known as plasticity. It was our contention that the application of the theory of divergent molecular evolution to promiscuous enzymes would enable us to design enzymes with greater specificity and higher activity.