Novel Strategies to Improve Yeast as an Expression Platform

Pichia pastoris (reclassified as Komagataella pastoris), is an established protein expression platform in the biopharmaceutical industry. It is valued for the availability of powerful and tightly regulated promoters, for its growth to very high densities and for its ability to secrete gram amounts of recombinant protein per litre of culture. Nevertheless, there is potential for improvement, especially as some proteins of interest are difficult to express in this system. This project seeks to develop novel strategies aimed at improving product quality and titre. It is a response to a challenge from Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies (FDB) to improve their Pichia expression system, part of their broad range of capabilities enabling contract work to be performed from gene to final recombinant protein bulk drug substance. It will be encompassed within the Centre of Excellence in Bioprocessing 2.0, a new partnership between the Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and York, the IBioIC and FDB. This is a rolling series of collaborative interdisciplinary research projects to address challenges in the manufacture of biologics.