H.M. Pharma Consultancy is happy to announce the launch of its newest technology and market report, again published and marketed by our longtime partners, Insight Pharma Reports:
“Engineering Next-Generation Therapeutic Proteins: Trends and Markets to 2020”
Table of contents and ordering details here
Read the Insight Pharma Reports press release here.
The pharmaceutical industry’s current dilemma has only two (comparatively) immediate solutions: find an ingenious way to repurpose small molecule drugs for new therapeutic uses; or design biological drugs to fit your purpose. There’s been much on drug repurposing on this blog. Now, a slight change of focus: biotech, second wave.
In the 1980s, pharmaceutical biotechnology was all the craze: everything from cancer to multiple sclerosis, not to mention AIDS, would be cured by these wonderful recombinant proteins and antibodies. Investors were eager to board ship as long as the biotechs that popped up in the United States (there was not much going on elsewhere) were young, and their shares cheap. What resulted is now known as the classical hype cycle: by the late 1990s biotech was about as “out” as it had been “in” at the time of overblown expectations. Sure, a few of the hopefuls had made it: Amgen, Genentech, Biogen, and a few others in the second line. But everything else was disappointment: large and delicate proteins, workable but too expensive to be used for anything but life-threatening conditions; monoclonal antibodies that were moderately effective because they had a short half life, and were too large to penetrate tissue properly.
And now biotech is back — roaring. And its quite different from what we became used to.
Today developers pick out high-affinity antibodies using sophisticated panning techniques, they look at the gene segments that code for the complementarity-determining regions (the parts that bind to the respective antigen), they chop off everything that is not needed for binding, link up several copies of these DNA sequences, optimize the codon usage for the recombinant expression system they intend to use; they produce the engineered protein chains and get them to fold correctly. The result is an artificial biodrug that can bind not two molecules of the same antigen (as a natural antibody would), but several; or it could bind different antigens at the same time – with unheard-of affinity and avidity. Want another type of biological activity thrown in? It can be done – fusion proteins can combine several domains. At the same time these constructs are much smaller than an antibody, much more stable, and behave much more like drugs.
And it is no longer only the United States where the ground is fertile. Companies from Germany, a country that once was so scared of biotech that you had to hand in a dozen forms before you were allowed to grow a transformed E. coli in a lab flask, now excel in protein engineering innovations. The United Kingdom, France, and Spain are doing fine too. China… well, in most cases we won’t really know whats going on in many of their their labs there until they are ready to show it — much as with their other high-tech programs. And what the Chinese do show us proves that they are every bit as good in protein engineering as they are elsewhere. The world is changing; keep up with it!