BioSpectrum Asia：从米粒生产重组蛋白用于工业和医学

Professor Daichang Yang

Wuhan University, China

Dr Daichang Yang did his PhD from Wuhan University and has worked as project scientist on the rice genome project at the International Rice Research Institute. He has also worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Molecular Agrobiology, National University of Singapore.

Human serum albumin (HSA) is a soluble protein that functions primarily as a carrier protein for steroids, fatty acids, and thyroid hormones, and plays an important role in stabilizing the extracellular fluid volume. HSA is widely used clinically to treat serious diseases and in the pharmaceutical industry. The market demand for HSA is estimated to be more than 600 tons per year worldwide, with 180 tones in China alone.

Currently, commercial production of HSA is primarily based on collected human plasma, which is limited in supply but of high clinical demand, not the least in China. It was reported that the shortage of human plasma led to a rapid increase in its demand. Furthermore,there is an increasing public health concern over plasma-derived HSA (pHSA) with its potential risk for transmission of blood-derived infectious pathogens such as hepatitis and HIV. To eliminate the potential risk of viral contamination, regulatory agencies have encouraged pharmaceutical companies to use non-animal-derived sources for pharmaceutical production. Thus, the development of a low-cost method for the production of recombinant HSA (rHSA) is essentially a safer and potentially unlimited alternative to pHSA.

In recent years, various plasma product alternatives have been developed in the world. Companies from Europe, America and Japan have spent a lot of capital to accelerate the commercial production of recombinant albumin. In the international markets, the replacement of blood products by recombinant human serum albumin is gaining popularity. The expression systems of bacteria, yeast and transgenic animals, plants or other systems have been used to produce recombinant human serum albumin (rHSA). However, none of them have been successfully commercialized due to various disadvantages.

Wuhan Healthgen Biotechnology has developed an OryzHiExp platform to solve the problems that other expression systems are experiencing. OryzHiExp has many advantages, including high expression level, cost-efficiency, simplicity of processing, high quality, enhanced safety and is environmental friendly.

This state-of-the-art technology, uses rice grain to produce large amounts of recombinant proteins or peptides for industrial and medical applications. It is also called molecular pharming.The procedures are summarized in the figure on left.

Wuhan Healthgen Biotechnology used this technology to successfully produce recombinant Human Serum Albumin (OsrHSA), recombinant alpha-1 antitrypsin (OsrAAT), recombinant acidic fibroblast growth factor (OsraFGF) and recombinant basic fibroblast growth factor (OsrbFGF). The expression level ranges from 20-to-150 μg per grain.Healthgen biotechnology will provide the competitive products and expression platform services to all its customers.