I-Corps: Accelerating recombinant protein screening

这个i-Corps项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是一个细菌蛋白质表达系统，它可以完全分泌蛋白质作为一个平台，为几个使用重组蛋白质作为其产品的成分或作为治疗药物本身的行业生产高纯度、低成本的蛋白质。化妆品、食品、生物材料和生物制药的制造商可能会感兴趣。这些行业需要大量高质量的重组蛋白用于药物开发、化妆品配方、食品生产和生物材料制造等各种目的。与传统的蛋白质生产方法相比，使用能够充分分泌蛋白质的重组蛋白表达系统在可伸缩性、重复性和成本效益方面具有显著的优势。因此，这项技术可以帮助他们简化生产流程，提高产品质量。所支持的行业正在创造改善可持续性和人类健康的产品，因此，一个能够让公司更快、更经济地生产这些产品的平台将造福于整个社会。这个i-Corps项目是基于开发一个能够充分分泌重组蛋白的细菌蛋白表达平台。工程上的成功已经能够以商业上相关的滴度生产分泌蛋白质。该系统的纯度水平远远超过传统的蛋白质表达系统，某些应用可能不需要任何额外的蛋白质纯化即可达到商业所需的纯度水平。从培养基中回收可溶性产物还可以避免复性或溶解蛋白质，这通常会导致蛋白质产量的损失，但当使用其他细菌生产宿主制造蛋白质时，这是必需的。这些改进将降低以蛋白质为基础的产品或使用蛋白质或酶前体的产品的总体生产成本。该平台结合了传统细菌蛋白生产系统的快速增长、简单的工程和低成本，以及其他更复杂的生产宿主更简单的纯化和产品回收。这使得快速生产高纯度的可溶性蛋白质，同时降低商品成本和加快开发时间。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is a bacterial protein expression system that can fully secrete proteins as a platform to produce high-purity, low-cost proteins for several industries that use recombinant proteins as ingredients for their products or as a therapeutic drug itself. Manufacturers of cosmetics, food products, biomaterials, and biopharmaceuticals may be interested. These industries require large quantities of high-quality recombinant proteins for various purposes such as drug development, cosmetic formulation, food production, and biomaterial fabrication. The use of a recombinant protein expression system that can fully secrete proteins could provide significant advantages in terms of scalability, reproducibility, and cost-effectiveness compared to traditional protein production methods. Therefore, this technology can help them streamline their production processes and improve the quality of their products. The industries supported are creating products that improve sustainability and human health and thus a platform that can allow companies to produce these products faster and more economically would benefit all of society. This I-Corps project is based on the development of a bacterial protein expression platform that can fully secrete recombinant proteins. Engineering successes have been able to produce secreted proteins at commercially relevant titers. Purity levels of the system far exceed those of legacy protein expression systems and some applications may not require any additional protein purification to reach commercially required purity levels. Recovering a soluble product from the culture medium also avoids refolding or solubilizing proteins which can often result in loss of protein yields but is required when manufacturing proteins using other bacterial production hosts. These improvements will decrease overall production costs of protein-based products or products that use protein or enzyme precursors. The platform combines the fast growth, simple engineering, and low cost of traditional bacterial protein production systems with the simpler purification and product recovery of other, more complex, production hosts. This allows for fast production of high purity, soluble proteins while reducing costs of goods and speeding development timelines.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.