Developmental Pipeline

Different stages of development from discovery through commercial manufacturing place different demands on expression systems. The Pfēnex Expression Technology platform can be effectively applied to all stages of development. In Research when small amounts of protein are required of a large number of proteins, hundreds of toolbox components are screened to rapidly generate protein. In the case of Lead Proteins when much higher productivity of high quality protein is the objective, thousands of toolbox components are screened to identify the ideal production strain to take forward in clinical development and commercialization.

The Power of Parallel Processing

Typical strain development projects done in microbial hosts like E. coli or yeast tend to be done in a linear and iterative fashion. One or a few strategies are tried and when they don’t work, some other strategies are tried, and so on. This approach is time consuming and very expensive both in resource deployment and maintenance which manifest as significant opportunity cost.

Pfēnex employs a different strategy; parallel processing. The plot above illustrates the extraordinary power of parallel processing for strain engineering. Typically as many as 600 completely unique expression strains containing thousands of toolbox components are constructed for each lead protein project. In the numerous projects we have completed, we find that only a small minority of strains, generally between 1 and 5 percent, expresses the highest titers of active product. This means that in a typical linear and iterative strain development program the chances of real success, with success being defined as high titers of soluble, active high quality protein, are only between 1 and 5 percent for each cycle of development. Parallel processing and the Pfēnex toolbox eliminate that risk. In fact, with proteins that have failed to express in other expression platforms such as E. coli and yeast, Pfēnex Expression Technology has had an 85% success rate.