The use of proteins as therapeutics has a long history and is becoming ever more common in modern medicine. While the number of protein-based drugs is growing every year, significant problems still remain with their use. Among these problems are rapid degradation and excretion from patients, thus requiring frequent dosing, which in turn increases the chances for an immunological response as wel...

background: cystatin c (cys c) has been implicated as a prognostic marker in cardiovascular disease. the aim of this study was to evaluate the value of cys c as a marker of acute kidney injury (aki) in acute heart failure (ahf), the impact of cys c and n-terminal probrain natriuretic peptides (nt-probnp) on in-hospital and 12 months mortality were also investigated. materials and methods: a tot...

In the process of finding better therapeutics, thousands new molecules are synthesised every day. Many these can be poorly soluble in water, leading to a potentially promising drug being rejected during testing due its poor solubility. Polyethylene glycol (PEG) has become known as an excellent modification remedy this and was initially used increase circulation time reduce immunogenicity therap...

The paper discusses general problems in using PEG for conjugation to high or low molecular weight molecules. Methods of binding PEG to different functional groups in macromolecules is reported together with their eventual limitations. Problems encountered in conjugation, such as the evaluation of the number of PEG chains bound, the localisation of the site of conjugation in polypeptides and the...

hirudin is an anticoagulant agent of the salivary glands of the medicinal leech. recombinant hirudin (r-hir) displays certain drawbacks including bleeding and immunogenicity. to solve these problems, cysteine-specific pegylation has been proposed as a successful technique. however, proper selection of the appropriate cysteine residue for substitution is a critical step. this study has, for the ...

for high-throughput production of recombinant protein in escherichia coli ( e. coli ), besides important parameters such as efficient vector with strong promoter and compatible host, other important issues including codon usage, rare codons, and gc content specially at n-terminal region should be considered. in the current study, the effect of decreasing the percentage of gc nucleotides and opt...