Moths in Oxford Aid Drug Discovery

13-Feb-2008

Cultured moth cells are the unlikely production platform for a technology that will aid drug discovery and help fight disease. The newly commercialised biotechnology company Oxford Expression Technologies Ltd (OET) is making this possible with an innovative range of products and services based upon the use of insect baculovirus protein expression technology.

The sequencing of the human genome provide a list of the thousands of genes in the human body. All genes produce different proteins, and it is these that offer the most exciting possibilities. By investigating the effects of individual proteins within the body, scientists can target specific proteins for further research and potential therapeutic drug design. To do this there needs to be technologies capable of producing the vast number of different proteins for research from the library of genes that has come from the Human Genome Project.

One of the most popular methods to make proteins is to use baculoviruses (insect-specific viruses) in insect cells in culture - the gene of interest is inserted into the virus, which infects the cultured insect cells and uses the internal mechanism of the cell to make the protein. Because insects are very close to humans in their genetic make up, the proteins produced are almost identical to human proteins.

A baculovirus is a virus that replicates only in the cells of butterflies, moths and caterpillars. OET's propriety "flashBAC" technology uses a genetically engineered form of the virus to enable the infected moth cells in culture to produce large amounts of a given protein through its natural method of replication making it a suitable vector for small and large scale protein expression systems

The Company's internationally renowned expertise and offering will allow scientists to produce proteins faster, more easily and cost-effectively using automated and high-throughput methods aiding the development of new drugs and more targeted research on understanding how proteins work in health and disease.

Oxford Expression Technologies Ltd, based in Oxford, was spun out in October 2007 by the Natural Environment Research Council from science carried out at Oxford Brookes University and the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.

https://www.bionity.com/en/news/77770/moths-in-oxford-aid-drug-discovery.html