Intein Mediated Ligation of Therapeutic Proteins

The project aligns to the biopharmaceutical industry, which is considered part of industrial biotechnology. It addresses the challenge of 'difficult-to-express' recombinant proteins. These are complex proteins that induce cellular stress during production, which limits overall yield and increases the costs of production. Our hypothesis is that the proposed strategy of expressing the protein in smaller, easier to express pieces i.e modules and then 'gluing' them together afterwards will increase yield and decrease costs of production. Our strategy is to adopt a modular approach to design and production of biomolecules that will allow modules to be developed independently and shared between multiple final products. Modules will also be expressed in micro-organisms allowing production to move away from the high cost current mammalian cell based process. In future, the same strategy could be used to screen new protein-drugs in high throughput, thereby increasing the productivity of the drug development pipeline.