Otimização da expressão e purificação de proteína recombinante imunossupressora

Abstract

The discovery of immunosuppressive drugs in the 1960s enabled immense advances in medicine, being used, for example, in transplant patients, with the purpose of treating and/or preventing graft rejection. Studies in the area continue to grow and evolve, in search of updates to the more targeted and specific therapeutic arsenal. At the Immunochemistry Laboratory of the Butantan Institute, a protein in the venom of the Lachesis muta snake was isolated and identified with immunosuppressive properties, named LMVp. The use of recombinant DNA technology has allowed advances in the synthesis of immunobiologicals, being crucial for research into the structure, function and production of therapeutic medicines. With the aim of achieving more effective performance in obtaining LMVp, this work used competent bacteria from the BL21 DE3 STAR PLYSS strain in an attempt to achieve optimization of the expression, purification and concentration processes of the recombinant protein. However, this optimization path did not prove to be efficient, demonstrating that other strategies must be followed to obtain better LMVp performance.