News
ProteoNic is a supplier of specialized products and services in the field of expression enhancement founded on its leading expertise in optimizing messenger RNA usage. Today, ProteoNic is proud to announce it has launched UNic-YTee™, its yeast specific Translation Enhancement Element (TEE). UNic-YTee™ is part of the company’s existing UNic™ expression technology toolbox already covering mammalian, fungal and plant production host systems. The UNic™ products boost translation efficiency and are complementary to transcription enhancing and other common expression technologies. ProteoNic achieved solid proof of concept increasing expression yields up to a factor 7 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae for several commercially relevant proteins.
ProteoNic has capitalized on its expertise in the field of translation enhancement and its successes in other hosts systems by also developing a yeast tailored TEE. S. cerevisiae strains equipped with UNic-YTee™ showed significantly increased production of a human pharmaceutical protein. The data also confirmed that ProteoNic’s method of high-throughput screening of yeast transformants provides a reproducible outcome and a reliable alternative for classical shake-flask experiments, saving both time and costs. This methodology is one of the strengths of ProteoNic’s upstream engineering program that combines production host improvement services with optimizing messenger RNA usage. ProteoNic had already demonstrated the value of its screening method for expression of industrial enzymes by filamentous fungi.
The yield enhancement success in yeast is confirmed in the hands of
a commercial partner. This partner expressed two different proprietary commercial genes at shake-flask scale using expression vectors containing our proprietary UNic™ technology based TEE-s. Following their own standard transformation and selection protocol, yields for both products were multiple fold higher as compared to strains containing their own commercial vectors. ProteoNic is setting up production scale evaluation studies for pharmaceutical and industrial proteins.
Sharief Barends, Head R&D adds: “I am proud that our team has achieved this milestone in the development of the UNic™ expression technology toolbox and related contract services. It validates our position as lead expert on translation optimization and demonstrates our drive to keep improving ourselves. These results for Saccharomyces cerevisiae allow us to expand our track record as we can service yet another segment of the protein manufacturing market.”