A universal sequence to increase protein production

Alexandra Moreira

i3S. Instituto de investigação e inovação em saúde. Universidade do Porto, Portugal

The recombinant protein industry has seen significant advances, with many recombinant proteins currently being produced and used in medicine worldwide across a variety of application fields, such as oncology, infectious diseases, endocrinology, and immunology. However, most of commercial recombinant proteins produced in large-scale cell culture require large volumes of media, making production very expensive. Therefore, the efficiency of protein production is an important bottleneck in most biopharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.

Moreira’s team has found and characterized a new DNA sequence they have named iPLUS, which can be widely used as an effective tool to boost recombinant protein production. iPLUS strongly increases protein production in several eukaryotic model systems including fruit fly, zebrafish and human cell lines. The iPLUS project offers an efficient solution to the biopharmaceutical and biotechnology industry by increasing recombinant protein production.