Engineering of XXXX for improved production of antibody fragments.

@entity10056 @entity167 @entity69055 @entity1520 @entity375 @entity16335
The methylotrophic @entity375 @entity10056 has been used for the expression of many proteins, including antibody fragments. However, limitations became obvious especially when secreting heterodimeric Fab fragments. Up-to-date, antibody fragments have only been expressed under control of the strong inducible @entity167 oxidase 1 (AOX1) promoter, which may stress the cells by excessive transcription. Here, we examined the secretion characteristics of single chain and Fab fragments of two different monoclonal anti-HIV1 antibodies (2F5 and 2G12) with both the AOX1 and the @entity16335 dehydrogenase (GAP) promoter. Also, the influences of different secretion leaders and strains were evaluated. Interestingly, secretion was only achieved when using the GAP promoter and the @entity375 mating factor alpha (MFalpha leader), whereas there was no difference between the two @entity10056 strains. During fed batch fermentation of a 2F5 Fab expressing strain, intracellular retention of Fab heavy chains was observed, while both intact Fab and single light chain molecules were only detected in the supernatants. This led to the conclusion that protein folding and heterodimer assembly in the ER are rate limiting steps in Fab secretion. To alleviate this limitation, @entity375 protein @entity1520 isomerase (PDI) and the unfolded protein response (UPR) transcription factor @entity69055 were constitutively overexpressed in @entity10056 . While the overexpression of @entity69055 led to a moderate increase of Fab secretion of 1.3-fold, PDI enabled an increase of the Fab level by 1.9-fold. Hence, the formation of interchain @entity1520 bonds can be seen as a major rate limiting factor to Fab assembly and subsequent secretion.
