Protein Therapeutics Drug Discovery
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Vaccines
While currently there is not a lot of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved protein based vaccines, there is a great potential in using recombinant protein technology in vaccine production. There is currently protein based vaccinations for Hepatitis B, HPV infection, and Lyme disease to name a few. In 2013, the FDA approved the first trivalent influenza vaccine, Flublok, made using an insect virus expression system and recombinant DNA technology. Unlike other flu vaccines, Flublok does not use the influenza virus or eggs in its production. It uses production of large quantities of the influenza virus protein, hemagglutinin (HA) – the active ingredient in all inactivated influenza vaccines
Vaccines come in two basic types: live attenuated and inactive. Live attenuated are produced by altering a disease producing virus or bacterium in a laboratory. The resulting organism retains the ability to grow and produce immunity. Many of the live attenuated vaccines that are available contain live viruses. Inactivated vaccines can be made up of either whole or a fraction of viruses or bacteria. Fractional vaccines are either protein based or polysaccharide based. Protein based vaccines include inactivated bacterial toxin and subunit or an incomplete viral particle.
that is essential for entry of the virus into cells in the body. According to the FDA, this new type of vaccine production “offers the potential for faster start-up of the vaccine manufacturing process in the event of a pandemic, because it is not dependent on an egg supply or on availability of the influenza virus”. Researchers from UC Berkeley have also recently discovered a host protein that is making a promising target for future anti-HIV drugs. By blocking the part of a key host protein to which Nef protein binds, researchers think it may be possible to slow or stop HIV.