I-Corps: Accelerating recombinant protein screening

Award ID: 2328626

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is a bacterial protein expression system that can fully secrete proteins as a platform to produce high-purity, low-cost proteins for several industries that use recombinant proteins as ingredients for their products or as a therapeutic drug itself. Manufacturers of cosmetics, food products, biomaterials, and biopharmaceuticals may be interested. These industries require large quantities of high-quality recombinant proteins for various purposes such as drug development, cosmetic formulation, food production, and biomaterial fabrication. The use of a recombinant protein expression system that can fully secrete proteins could provide significant advantages in terms of scalability, reproducibility, and cost-effectiveness compared to traditional protein production methods. Therefore, this technology can help them streamline their production processes and improve the quality of their products. The industries supported are creating products that improve sustainability and human health and thus a platform that can allow companies to produce these products faster and more economically would benefit all of society. This I-Corps project is based on the development of a bacterial protein expression platform that can fully secrete recombinant proteins. Engineering successes have been able to produce secreted proteins at commercially relevant titers. Purity levels of the system far exceed those of legacy protein expression systems and some applications may not require any additional protein purification to reach commercially required purity levels. Recovering a soluble product from the culture medium also avoids refolding or solubilizing proteins which can often result in loss of protein yields but is required when manufacturing proteins using other bacterial production hosts. These improvements will decrease overall production costs of protein-based products or products that use protein or enzyme precursors. The platform combines the fast growth, simple engineering, and low cost of traditional bacterial protein production systems with the simpler purification and product recovery of other, more complex, production hosts. This allows for fast production of high purity, soluble proteins while reducing costs of goods and speeding development timelines. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Jaime A. Camelio