Core Technologies

Generation of biomolecules and cell lines with optimised glycosylation

Most pharmaceutical relevant biomolecules are proteins which carry species-specific carbohydrate chains, such as growth factors, cytokines, hormones and antibodies. Currently these proteins are mainly manufactured in bacteria or yeast.
These molecules lack glycosylations or carry irrelevant foreign carbohydrate structures. Alternative approaches use rodent mammalian cell lines for expression of these molecules (e.g. CHO cells), however, while this type of glycosylation is much closer to a human glycosylation than yeast important differences still exist, for example the lack of an important sialylation type and the existence of non-human sugars which often result in a lower activity, unfavourable serum half-life and immunogenicity. One prominent problem is the low half-life of current products which is often tackled by chemically modifying the biomolecules, e.g. through PEGylation. Those modified products are mostly largely reduced in their in vitro acitivity and often have similar problems as mentioned above including immunogenicity, suboptimal activities and considerable side-effects.

Obviously, the solution to these problems would be the construction of a fully human molecule. In order to construct optimal pharmaceutical proteins the aim must be to generate a fully human glycosylation with an optimal degree of sialylation in order to avoid immunogenicity, and to optimise bioactivity and serum half-life.

Being glycobiologists by heart and knowing the huge complexicity of the glycosylation machinery with hundreds of enzymes involved, we believe that the best approach is to make use of nature’s potential.


GlycoExpress:

GlycoExpress is a novel expression system for the production of new generations of biologics and biopharmaceuticals with higher biological activity. GlycoExpress allows a fully human glycosylation of proteins. In addition, the molecules can be generated with various defined degrees of sialylation allowing the optimization of serum-half-life, activity, stability of the protein, its production processes, and dosing. GlycoExpress is based on glycoengineered human cell lines with optimal biotechnological properties (suspension culture, 15-24 h doubling time, easy cell cloning and molecular biological modification, production of high amounts of secreted glycoproteins, including soluble fragments of membrane proteins serum free and virus free, origin and transformation events known, full documentation). Our IP situation allows a new patent protection of the product and the process.

With this technology we were able to improve the bioactivity of hGM-CSF already in vitro by 500fold compared to hGM-CSF from E.coli and yeast. Due to the fully human glycosylation status with a high sialylation degree we expect further advantages for the serum-half life and antigenicity / immunogenicity.

We offer this platform and our services for the generation of more effective new generations of generic blockbusters and for the improvement of your own protein.

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