Fine-Tuned Protein Capture Technique Could Aid Drug Manufacture
A critical step in drug manufacture is the separation of "proteins of interest" – the active elements in drugs – from other materials. The primary method used is ion-exchange chromatography, which is like using a colander to separate cooked pasta from water, and it involves many phases. "Our fundamental understanding of this process at the level where proteins bind to ligands, which basically drives several different industries, is ridiculously small," says Rice University chemist Christy Landes. Now, Landes and her team have created a way to fine-tune the process. A combination of the Rice technique that provides pinpoint locations for single proteins and a theory that describes those proteins' interactions with other molecules could widen a bottleneck in the manufacture of drugs by making the process of isolating proteins five times more efficient.
Transcript
00:00:13 we are going to look at the single-molecule embassy target we are looking for is a single protein which is like thousands or tens of thousands smaller times smaller than dust protein separations are very important in the research and development of new drugs and also the production of drugs that are already in use it can be up to fifty percent of the cost and what we did here
00:00:38 is look at this process at a very foundational level on the nanometer scale using advanced microscopy so that we found a way to design the separation process so it can be more efficient for the pharmaceutical industry to use this is a column a standard column that you would use in a lab to do an experiment on a daily basis basically what happens is that you see this white part here
00:01:00 it's a powder originally it's silica gel and then you mix it with a solvent and it forms this column you would add whatever you wanted to separate on the top like your solution and as it goes down it would separate into different layers and so at different points in time you would have a different population or different chemical coming out so industrial and lab separations so
00:01:22 all across the world these chromatography processes are exactly the same the simplest con is just like a colander it's a size exclusion so in other words you have a pot full of spaghetti in water all you wants the spaghetti and so you design a column or a colander such that when you pour your mixture spaghetti cluster into the colander the water goes through and the
00:01:42 spaghetti stays behind that size exclusion chromatography then one step more complicated in that say you have two kinds of spaghetti in your pot one that's positively charged and one that's negatively charged so now you design your colander such that not only does it have holes so the water goes through but now also has charges so that the oppositely charged spaghetti stays and
00:02:03 then this the same charge spaghetti goes through that's called ion exchange chromatography and that's the kind that we're studying the engineered design we developed with our collaborators at the University of Houston can lead to a fivefold improvement in the efficiency compared to what's commonly being used in the industry today one of the reasons we're so proud of this research and also
00:02:26 this project is funded by the National Science Foundation's engineering Directorate and specifically they're very interested in improving separations so there's a whole subset of the National Science Foundation that's very very interested in proving separations because it's such an important problem for not just pharmaceutical industry but many many different industries including
00:02:48 it's important to Houston of course including the petrochemical industry and then the other thing I think that's very nice is that from the National Science Foundation's perspective and also I guess everyone's perspective you would like the research experience to provide an educational opportunity at every level of the educational experience and so when you describe what you're going
00:03:09 to do in the future you always say that this is going to benefit a post off because they're going to learn how to mentor students it's going to benefit a graduate student because they're going to learn to be an independent researcher and it's going to benefit in undergraduate because it's going to introduce them to the exciting world of a cutting-edge research but it doesn't
00:03:27 often work out that way and this project in this is an example of one that did work out that way that we have an excellent undergraduate student aundrea mandsaur an excellent graduate student Lydia cos Lee an outstanding post Ossetia and Chen all working together to make this project work