Cell-free glycoprotein synthesis

癌症治疗的不同成功率表明，在治疗干预方面，一种尺寸并不适合所有人。这一点通过发现导致同一疾病的多个基因得到了证实，这些基因决定了个体可能受到的影响有多严重。如果疾病特征是针对个人或一组患者的，那么治疗方案也需要个性化，这一概念被称为个性化医疗。但是，如果像使用抗体靶向癌细胞的先进疗法这样的药物要个性化，这意味着我们需要有一种方法，与目前的大规模生产策略相比，以相对较小的规模快速生产和评估不同的候选药物。目前，这些抗体和其他治疗性蛋白质在活细胞中产生。这使得它们的生产过程既费力又耗时。这也意味着生产所需的大量投资并不一定值得开发个性化的解决方案。我们已经开发出一种替代方法来生产这些药物，不涉及细胞的生活状态。相反，我们大批量培养细胞，然后提取它们的机器并冷冻，然后我们可以按需使用它来小规模（甚至大规模）生产任何蛋白质以供测试。在这个项目中，我们将与阿斯利康合作，开发一种更高效的方法，降低生产成本。我们将通过在提取细胞的机器之前修饰细胞来做到这一点，以便后者可以制造更多的蛋白质。最后，我们将测试我们的抗体产品的质量，并将其与细胞产生的材料进行比较。

The varying success rates of cancer treatments demonstrate that one size does not fit all when it comes to therapeutic interventions. This is confirmed by the discovery of multiple genes that are responsible for the same disease, which determine how severely an individual may be impacted. If disease profiles are specific to an individual or a group of patients, then treatment regimes also need to be individualised, a concept known as personalised medicine. But if medicines like advanced therapies using antibodies to target cancer cells are to be personalised, this means we need to have a way to rapidly produce and assess different candidates at a relatively small scale compared to current mass production strategies. Currently, these antibodies and other therapeutic proteins are produced in living cells. This makes their production process both laborious and time consuming. It also means that the large investment necessary for production does not necessarily make it worthwhile to develop individualised solutions. We have developed an alternative approach to the production of these medicines that does not involve cells in their living state. Instead we grow the cells in large batches and then extract their machinery and freeze it. We can then use it on-demand to make any protein at small (or even large) scale for testing. In this project, we will work in collaboration with AstraZeneca to develop a more productive version of our approach, which reduces the cost of production. We will do this by modifying the cells before extracting their machinery so that the latter can make more protein. Finally, we will test the quality of our antibody products and compare it to that of cell-produced material.