Pharmaceutical biotechnology - concepts and applications

The book starts with a brief history of the discovery and application of therapeutic drugs, such as sulfa drugs, which were one of the very first to be marketed, and then proceeds to various bioformulations and their widespread use. The pharmaceutical companies that have marketed bioformulations use biotechnology principles such as recombinant DNA technology to design more effective protein-based drugs, such as erythropoietin and fast-acting insulin. The book explains how the advances in other areas such as genomics, proteomics and high-throughput screening have paved the way for exploring new avenues of drug discovery. The author also offers a prospective analysis of the use of gene therapy and whole cell-based therapeutics such as stem cells.The future of pharmaceuticals belongs to protein based therapeutics. Designing stable and effective therapeutic proteins requires knowledge of protein structure and the interactions that stabilise the structure necessary for function. The book discusses the various levels of protein structure and the types of interactions between amino acid residues that improve protein folding and stability. Structure prediction methods can be used for those proteins for which no structure is available. Therapeutic proteins frequently contain post translational modifications - for example, glycosylation of erythropoietin. The author discusses different types of such modifications, their effect on protein function (with examples from protein formulations that are currently in use) and methods for their production in the laboratory.The book goes on to address technical aspects of protein drug discovery in sufficient detail to cover the qualitative principles involved. For large-scale protein synthesis, recombinant DNA technology is used. This includes extracting the DNA or RNA of interest from biological samples such as cells or tissues, integrating the DNA encoding the protein of interest into an appropriate cloning vector, finding suitable ho