BioCentury
ARTICLE | Tools & Techniques

Engineering protein stability

February 17, 2011 8:00 AM UTC

Two American teams have proposed distinct strategies to improve the stability of recombinant proteins. The techniques could be used to increase the manufacturing yield, shelf life and potentially the duration of efficacy of biologics, including antibodies and therapeutic cytokines.

Efforts to improve a protein's stability typically require the production of hundreds of variants and characterization of their biophysical properties in vitro in order to choose the best variant. The two new techniques are expected to be applicable to a range of proteins and could stabilize antibodies and therapeutic cytokines more quickly and efficiently than current methods (see "Two approaches for improving protein stability")...