Molecular Biotechnology: From DNA Sequence to Therapeutic Protein

Therapeutic proteins have become a valuable addition to the repertoire of drugs to treat patients with severe diseases. Therapeutic proteins differ in many aspects from classical, small molecule drugs. They differ, for example, in molecular size, composition, production, purification, contaminations, side effects, stability, formulation, and regulatory aspects. This chapter describes basic elements of the selection, design, cloning, and production of biopharmaceuticals. The importance of the expression host in relation to specific posttranslational modifications, such as the formation of disulfide bridges and glycosylation, is discussed. And finally, we describe the molecular biological aspects of the design and production of (humanized) monoclonal antibodies in cell culture.