Fermentation for Recombinant Proteins
As a leading CDMO, BOC Sciences provides one-stop services to manufacture recombinant proteins. With advanced fermentation and purification technologies, our team of leading scientists supports the development and large-scale production of recombinant proteins, helping our customers to accelerate their projects.
Learn more about Fermentation Products.
What is Recombinant Protein?
Recombinant protein is a protein encoded by recombinant DNA. Modification of the gene can lead to expression of a mutant protein. The use of recombinant DNA technology to express recombinant proteins in unnaturally occurring cells is known as heterologous protein production. Recombinant DNA technology has made possible the large scale production of proteins that were previously unavailable, relatively expensive or difficult to obtain in large quantities. Recombinant proteins are formed by transfecting foreign genes into a host cell, and the steps for producing recombinant proteins include:
- Isolate gene of interest
- Insert gene of interest into plasmid DNA
- Transform recombinant DNA plasmid into host
- Plate cells onto agarose gels
- Expand the positive clones to exponentially replicate copies of desired DNA
- Expression of proteins of interest
Host of recombinant proteins
The strains commonly used to produce recombinant proteins include Escherichia coli, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Pichia pastoris, CHO cells and baculovirus-infected insect cells. E. coli is widely used as a host for heterogeneous protein expression because of its ease of growth and manipulation, its well-known knowledge of genetics and biology, its ability to achieve expression quickly, its proven fermentation technology. In contrast to E. coli, which is unable to perform eukaryotic-specific post-translational modifications due to its status as a prokaryote, S. cerevisiae and P. pastoris, as eukaryotic microorganisms, are able to produce recombinant therapeutic proteins closer to those of humans. CHO cells are one of the most popular hosts for recombinant proteins, used for the production of monoclonal antibodies and more humanlike therapeutic proteins. The baculovirus-insect cell system also supports the production of a large number of proteins with complex post-translational modifications.
Category of recombinant proteins
Recombinant proteins are widely used in the pharmaceutical industry, such as antibodies or antibody fragments and enzymes for disease treatment, protein-based polymers for drug delivery, and recombinant protein scaffolds for tissue engineering, etc.
| Types of recombinant proteins | Examples | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Industrial enzymes | Amylases, lipase, chymosin, glucose oxidase, pullulanase, enterokinase, invertase, cellulase, xylanase |
| 2 | Therapeutic proteins | Insulin,insulin glargine, insulin lispro, Fab and ScFv fragments, monoclonal antibodies, recombinant vaccines, interferons |
| 3 | Therapeutic enzymes | Streptokinase, urokinase, trypsin, glutaminase, B-lactamase, l-asparaginase, glucosidase, collagenase, uricase |
| 4 | Protein scaffolds | Human collagen, bacterial collagen, spider silk analogs, coiled-coil silk, tropoelastin, elastin segments, resilin |
Our Services
- Strain improvement, such as genetic recombination, cloning, transfection, etc.
- Fermentation upstream and downstream process optimization, such as the use of single-use systems.
- Fed-batch or continuous fermentation in high-cell-density.
- Purification process development, such as membrane chromatography.
- One-stop services for recombinant proteins from host strains development to commercial scale-up manufacturing.
Our Fermentation Capabilities
- Lab-scale: equipped with 30 L to 200 L fermentation tanks
- Pilot-scale: equipped with fully automatic fermentation tanks of different volumes ranging from 4,000 L to 12,000 L
- Commercial-scale: Fermentation tanks of 10 to 120 m3
Our Advantages
- Consistent process and quality product development using QbD (Quality-by-Design)
- Efficient upstream and downstream process development
- High throughput equipment and GMP facilities
- Flexible, automated fermentation platform and economical product development
- High product yield and quality and low cost
- Investment in environmental protection measures and skills
- Well-established quality system, which has passed through a series of official inspections and customer audits
