A faster way to pure proteins
designed to take the legwork out of extracting proteins made in
microbial or insect cells.
The system, called Piccolo, will enable research groups to go into full protein production much earlier and to progress experiments faster. The earlier availability of pure protein should allow more thorough evaluation of compounds and help prevent compounds failing once expensive trials are underway. Clinical attrition rates are greatest in Phase II trials, where more than half of all investigated compounds fail.
Early protein isolation can also help companies make decisions about whether to continue a drug development programme earlier, one of the primary recommendations for improving R&D productivity in a new report by the Tufts Centre for the Study of Drug Development.
The system, called Piccolo, automates all the functions needed to make proteins in these cells, including an incubator and modules to harvest the cells, break down their membranes and purify the target protein.
Piccolo "has been designed to overcome the limitations of manual approaches to protein optimisation and reduce the time required from months to days," according to TAP.
Richard Wales, TAP's head of business development, said that the key applications for the system will be to produce proteins for structural biology, assay development and protein engineering, but it could also be used for intermediate scale-up of protein production.
The advantage that Piccolo brings over current manual methods of protein production optimisation, according to TAP, is its ability to vary and control a wide range of protein culture parameters - such as temperature, induction dynamics, media, and expression time - independently. It can also conduct experiments in parallel.
TAP has also developed an automated cell culture system for mammalian cells, called SelecT, which was launched onto the market in 2001.
The new system will be presented at the Pep Talk conference in San Diego, California, US, on 12-14 January.
