Application of Yeast in Biopharmaceutical Field

Recent innovations in yeast have opened up new applications for recombinant protein production. Yeast systems are end-to-end platforms for the discovery, development and manufacture of biopharmaceuticals. Significant improvements include glycoengineering technologies, display technologies and libraries that support the use and development of yeast in all aspects of biomedical research. These advancements are transforming the yeast platform from a simple production system into a critical technology asset for the discovery and selection of biopharmaceutical lead candidates, and are also important for the supply of marketed biopharmaceuticals and the pipeline of new therapeutics.

In recent years, many new biopharmaceutical candidates have been produced on the Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Pichia pastoris and Hansenula polymorpha platforms. For example, Pichia pastoris has been used to produce recombinant human insulin at a titer of 3 g/L. Thus, the next decade of biopharmaceutical development will prove fruitful for yeast, providing a global platform for life-changing medicines.

Excellent eukaryotic microbial recombinant protein production systems mainly include Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Pichia pastoris. They are all capable of producing recombinant proteins with proper folding and post-translational modifications.

• The Saccharomyces cerevisiae expression system is frequently used due to its rapid growth in protein-free media and the ability to secrete extracellular products. However, intracellular post-translational modifications often lead to the unintended production of hypermannosylation, which alters the binding activity of the protein and may result in an altered immune response for therapeutic applications.
• Pichia pastoris is an expression system whose high cell density provides it with a strong and tightly regulated promoter and the potential to produce grams of recombinant protein secreted intracellularly per liter of culture. However, protein yields can be significantly reduced, especially if the complex proteins expressed are heteromeric, membrane attached or readily degraded. And because Pichia oligosaccharides have shorter chain lengths, such sugars have been reported to produce complex terminal sialic acids or "humanized" glycoproteins.

Related applications

Early biopharmaceuticals were derived from animals and humans, and most newly launched products were derived from recombinant expression systems. Yeast, bacteria (i.e. E. coli) and mammalian hosts (i.e. Chinese hamster ovary) represent the most commonly used expression systems for biopharmaceuticals. Among them, the application of yeast is very extensive.

• In the early 1980s, recombinant human insulin became available, providing patients with type 1 diabetes a more homogeneous and reliable drug that no longer needed to be harvested from the pancreas of animals. Today, the S. cerevisiae platform currently provides half of the world's insulin supply.
• Yeast engineering of yeast-based platforms not only provides the ability to make low-complexity aglycosylated peptides or proteins, but also focuses considerable efforts on strain improvement to develop glycoproteins with desired physicochemical properties and efficacy (Glycoengineered yeast systems).
• Innovations in yeast genetics and protein secretion that have made yeast a state-of-the-art tool for biopharmaceutical research and development will also be discussed.
• The core of the early development of antibody drugs is library screening to obtain monoclonal antibodies with high specificity and high affinity. There are two major technology platforms for mainstream library screening: yeast / phage display library screening and hybridoma cell screening. It can also perform toxicity screening, drug target screening, small molecule drug screening, lead compound screening, disease drug screening, etc.
• A very important application of yeast is the production of vaccines. A wide variety of yeast vaccines have been put into production, such as recombinant hepatitis B vaccine (Hansenula), HPV vaccine (quadrivalent / ninevalent) (Hansenula / Saccharomyces cerevisiae), recombinant enterovirus 71 virus-like particle vaccine (Pichia pastoris), recombinant yeast hepatitis B vaccine is hepatitis B surface antigen (HbsAg) subunit vaccine.

Creative BioMart has accumulated many years of experience in the field of yeast research, helping our customers accelerate research in all fields using yeast as a research tool, and improve the overall success rate of the project. Please tell us your project requirements, and we will provide you with a full service from strategy design to final report. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.