Medicines play an indisputable role in life extension and improvement of the quality of life. To obtain medicinal compounds, researchers traditionally rely on natural sources and chemical synthesis, however, currently developing biotechnological methods allow one to introduce the group of genes encoding new metabolic pathways into the genomes of heterologous hosts and regulate activity of the hosts' intrinsic metabolic pathways. Such an approach makes it possible to reproduce biosynthesis of bioactive substances in heterologous hosts, the approach combines the benefits of conventional methods and works around the shorcomings of those. In our view, the use of metabolic engineering to obtain medicinal compounds is becoming increasingly important for their production.