Seminars Archive

Relevance of Protein Expression and Purification in a Drug Discovery Perspective

Abstract
Expression and purification of recombinant proteins is a fundamental requirement for a variety of biological research applications, from exploratory research to pharmaceutical drug discovery. The past 5 years have witnessed a very fast evolution of technologies used in postgenomics. One of the fields that was highly boosted by the ‘’omics’’ initiatives is the production of recombinant proteins, which experienced an extraordinary increase of throughput and results fueling thus the comprehension of challenging scientific questions. This is the typical frame of activity for specialists in protein production working in a pharmaceutical R&D environment, such that of Nerviano Medical Sciences (NMS), based in Milan area: the largest pharmaceutical R&D facility in Italy and one of the largest oncology-focused, integrated discovery and development companies in Europe. The Biochemistry group of NMS supports the whole protein production requirements for the internal drug discovery process that encompass HTS, primary and secondary screening, and structural studies by NMR and X-Ray Crystallography. This talk will cover a series of success cases with the focus on most relevant results obtained under my supervision by the NMS’s Biochemistry group for the structural based drug discovery process.