Protein is big business. Not only does it make up a significant portion of every living thing—it’s also a $150 billion per-year industry. Whether for food, medicine, or manufacturing, nearly all sectors have a need for proteins to create their products. But in the case of pharmaceuticals, the need for proteins also comes with a big cost, one that pharmaceutical manufacturers desperately need to find their way around: the cost of protein purification. But now, thanks Alan Russell, professor of chemical engineering, and Ph.D. student Stefanie Baker, the pharmaceutical industry has an innovative way around this costly problem when manufacturing protein-polymer therapeutics. Russell, Baker, and their team have developed a novel method to purify the protein-polymer conjugates used in pharmaceuticals to ensure they perform properly, work that was recently published in Nature Communications.
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Source: Phys.org