Onsite Synthesis of Protein Medicines Inside the Body

Protein medicines have great therapeutic importance, however, in many cases lack of feasible industrial process and an efficient drug delivery system curbs wider clinical implementation. Here we propose that miniature artificial inert ‘factories’ will be injected to the patient, to produce a protein of interest directly in the disease site, in response to a physical trigger, and perform a programmed therapeutic task. This approach increases treatment efficiency and reduces adverse effects to healthy tissues.

We are engineering particles with an autonomous capacity to synthesize protein drugs after receiving an external signal – Protein Producing Particles (PPP). The content of the particles is based on new T7-S30 cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) system that was developed and optimized by us (Krinsky et al., 2016). The protein is tuned to the patient`s needs based on a predetermined DNA code we incorporate inside the particles. Using the artificial factories we are able to produce wide range of diagnostic and therapeutic proteins including luciferase, green fluorescent protein (sfGFP) and pseudomonas exotoxin A (PE). Recently, we were able to show the therapeutic efficacy of PE produced by PPP in vitro and in vivo and to monitor online the production of luciferase in vivo.

PPP serve as autonomous, trigger-able, artificial factories that produce a variety of proteins. This platform has promise to address a wide range of fundamental questions associated with protein synthesis in nature, as well as applicative protein delivery needs.