This invention is a new protein transduction method for efficient delivery of exogenous proteins into mammalian cells. In contrast to known protein transduction methods, this new approach has the capability of targeting transduced proteins to different cellular compartments, as well as protecting the proteins from degradation by cellular proteases. The reagent for delivery of the proteins is composed of cationic agents, lipids and enhancer in a carrier. The Approach uses bacteria to produce recombinant proteins that are then modified with the reagent and delivered into mammalian cells. The mammalian cell machinery folds and post-translationally modifies the transduced proteins to produce native functional proteins that can be easily purified from the cells. The final high yield of properly folded and modified protein can be 35-60% of added bacterial expressed proteins. This discovery provides a foundation for future applications of protein transduction technology, atomic resolution cell biology and protein drug therapy to treat human disease to name a few applications.
Commercial Applications
· Extend Structural/ Folding studies of proteins in living cells
· Prepare proteins with correct-transcriptional modifications
· Propare properly folded proteins with a large quantity for every single protein
Competitive Advantages
· Solves the major folding problem of bacterial expression, by using both high-level bacterial expression and powerful folding machinery of the machinery of the mammalian cells
· Ability to produce milligram quantity properly folded proteins, which is impossible to obtain using only bacterial expression
Patent Status
A patent application is on file.
Tech ID
07-830