BresaGen to launch new manufacturing service

Adelaide's BresaGen Ltd is about to launch its new ProtEcol service to manufacture recombinant proteins and peptide therapeutics for client biotech companies in Australia and overseas.

BresaGen's R&D manager Dr Stan Bastiras will launch the new service at the BioLOGIC Asia 2002 conference in Singapore next week.

ProtEcol will build upon the company's expertise in developing Escherichia coli bacterial expression systems for recombinant proteins.

Last week Melbourne biopharma Metabolic Pharmaceuticals announced it had engaged BresaGen to develop a scaleable production system for its experimental peptide therapeutic for obesity, AOD9604.

Because small peptide molecules expressed in E. coli tend to break down, BresaGen is developing a system in which the peptide will be expressed within a larger protein molecule, then cleaved to yield the 16-amino acid active fragment.

The company's business development manager, Dr Jackie Zanetti, said ProtEcol would offer a one-stop-shop service to biopharmaceutical companies with specialised requirements for the synthesis of therapeutic proteins.

"Over the years we've developed a few tricks for expressing difficult proteins, which we now want to apply to contract work for process development of proteins and peptides," Dr Sanetti said.

"It's cheaper to use recombinant methods than to synthesis peptides, especially larger peptides, and many business opportunities are emerging.

"The constructs we use depend on the amino acid sequence of the peptide, or the structure of the molecule, and whether customers need it in native form or tagged in some way with other molecules.

"For example, we offer a range of promoters and cleavage methods -- or we can create constructs so that the protein is incorporated in inclusion bodies in the cells, to make it easier to separate out from unwanted bacterial proteins during purification."