Production of Recombinant Biologics Using Engineered Protein Shells
摘要
Recombinant proteins play a pivotal role across industrial, biopharmaceutical, and agricultural sectors. Escherichia Coli stands out as the preferred host system for heterologous protein expression due to its simplicity, versatility, and cost-effectiveness. However, the challenge of protein misfolding persists, resulting from cellular stress and the prokaryotic host’s inability to perform crucial post-translational modifications. Due to the high substrate loads present in recombinant expression contexts, chaperones are also oversaturated and unable to regulate the folding process effectively. Current solutions, relying on co-expression of chaperone proteins, often fall short due to undesirable side effects of chaperone overproduction. This study utilizes a novel approach featuring thermostable Exoshells (tES), engineered protein-based nanoparticles derived from Archaeoglobus Fulgidus ferritin, that encapsulate Transforming Growth Factor Beta 1 (TGF-β1). Engineered with unique technical capabilities, tES boasts several technical advantages over typical chaperone proteins. These capabilities were used to encapsulate TGF-β1, an ubiquitous growth factor prone to aggregation with extremely high production costs. tES has been used in previous studies and has boosted functional yields of various proteins between 2-fold to > 100-fold, making it a promising low-cost and simple method of production for such difficult to fold proteins.