Advantages And Disadvantages Of Biopharmaceuticals

With the emergence of new diseases across the globe, there has been a growing demand for the development of effective biological agents, in other words, also known as biopharmaceuticals. Today, due to the progress in research and particularly, recombinant technologies, these products have become an essential part of medicine. But as it has been said, nothing comes easy, everything comes with a cost. So in this case too, although the production of therapeutic agents has benefitted the community worldwide, the cost of production and the need for specific expression systems has proved to be a major disadvantage.

Over the past few years, researchers mainly focused on Escherichia coli as an expression system because of its simple needs for faster growth. But the inability of this organism to undergo glycosylation, made researchers look out for other existing options. Thus, yeast and fungal expression systems were introduced for the production of recombinant products such as insulin, hormones, vaccines, antibodies etc.

But it needs to undergo certain modifications, also known as PTM to be an effective system. The modifications that these organisms are capable of undergoing are glycosylation, acetylation, formation of disulfide bonds and proteolytic processing. The two most frequently used yeast are Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Pichia pastoris. These have the capability of expressing proteins with higher yields as well as the property to undergo glycosylation [1]. Although P. pastoris, currently rechristened as Komagataella pastoris was initially developed by Phillips Petroleum for some other use, nowadays it has been developed for the expression of a variety of