Pharmaceutical
Improved therapeutic protein development. Engineer therapeutic proteins to improve properties such as stability, potency, binding affinity, and immunogenicity.
Typically, site-directed and random mutagenesis are used to elucidate biological processes, determine protein structure, and develop screening assays, research reagents, and protein drugs. Codon technology vastly expands the possibilities by providing thousands of site-directed mutants of each protein of interest at a fraction of the effort and cost of manual site-directed mutagenesis.
Further, we can synthesize libraries of defined sequences with complexity tailored to the screen or selection method to be used (104 to 1013 unique sequences). Such defined libraries can incorporate all available information from computational or phylogenetic studies, thus minimizing the number of unfolded and inactive proteins commonly found in libraries made from degenerate nucleotides.
Natural and engineered therapeutic production. Rapidly develop cell lines to explore biosynthetic pathways for improved performance and cost.
Many pharmaceutical intermediates and active ingredients can be synthesized biologically, often at lower cost and with significantly lower environmental impact than analogous processes involving organic chemistry. These pharmaceuticals are the products of biosynthetic pathways involving multiple genes. Codon’s technology for engineering and constructing DNA at the operon scale enables rapid development of cell lines optimized for production of desired pharmaceuticals. See the press release on our work with Microbia in this area.
Rapid response vaccines. Rapidly obtain putative antigen genes, optionally coupled to adjuvants, for pandemic and seasonal vaccine development.
In both research and in the production of vaccines, speed of development is critical to the pharmaceutical industry. With Codon Devices, it is now possible to shorten many processes from months to weeks, or from weeks to days.