Project: Integrated, multi-host approach for the improved microbial production of high quality therapeutic enzymes and proteins

Many enzymes and other proteins of pharmacological interest and addressed to human therapy are presently produced by cultured mammalian cells through expensive procedures, resulting in high-priced products. The choice of mammalian cells instead of simpler microbial systems is often prompted by the occurrence of structural properties (disulfide bridge, proper conformation, glycosylation etc) linked to the requested biological activity, that cannot be fully reproduced in microbial cells. However, the incorporation of new hosts for therapeutic protein production and the fast-moving advances in protein and metabolic engineering, strain and process design and physiological analysis of stress responses make the production of complex therapeutic proteins in microbial hosts a more feasible and economically competitive industrial biotechnology concept. The objective of this proposal is to obtain functional therapeutic proteins by microbial production, and to create scientific data with wide applicability to diverse protein production problems in industrial biotechnology. The project will combine modular protein engineering approaches with metabolic and process engineering to obtain functional enzymes through microbial production processes, and will comparatively analyze the suitability of alternative microbial hosts, either conventional or novel, regarding the biological properties of a target therapeutic protein, the human alfa‑galactosidase A

Acronym	IMAPPROT
Website	visit project website
Network	ERA-IB
Call	1st ERA-IB joint call

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
	Autonomous University of Barcelona	Coordinator	Spain
	Bioingenium SL		Spain
	Technical Research Centre of FI		Finland
	University of Naples Federico II		Italy
	University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna		Austria
	Vall d’Hebron University Hospital		Spain