"Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." - John F. Kennedy

Project description

The nowadays production methods of antibodies are not only time-consuming and costly but are at the expense of animal lives. Antibodies have many applications in research, diagnostics, and show great promise in treatment of cancer. But the advancement is held back due to the expensive and tiresome production. Therefore we propose an alternative to antibodies; peptide aptamers – produced in Escherichia coli (E. coli). The variable loop of the peptide aptamer is generated through a random nucleotide library and held together by an enzymatic inactive version of human Thioredoxin (hThx) as a scaffold protein. We are using the bacterial two-hybrid system to screen for functioning peptide aptamers that are able to bind our chosen target proteins (‘antigens’). In this model bacteria expressing a functioning peptide aptamer will express Red Fluorescent Protein (RFP), which enables us to isolate them. To challenge the antibody tradition, we are also proposing a production model.

The problem

As mentioned above, the problem is that antibodies are expensive to produce, since time is money. So far antibodies have remained the most useful tool for researchers to detect, purify and tag proteins just to mention a few purposes. To meet researchers demands, a great number of animals have to sacrifice their lifes to please humans and our survival. Since we love animals and innovation we thought of an alternative approach to manage these demands.

The brains behind the great idea

Our team consist of nine students from five different educations; philosophy, chemical engineering, biomedicine, biochemistry and molecular biology and medicine. During this last 6 months we have laughed, cried, builded friendships and overcome a lot of struggles together. In the end of the day it has just been a whole lot of fun! To guide and help us through the journey we have had our four supervisors.