UNK-Express is the company's proprietary complex protein expression platform, developed specifically for complex disulfide-bonded and dimeric proteins that are difficult to produce in traditional E. coli systems. It breaks through the bottleneck of insufficient intracellular oxidative environment in prokaryotic hosts, achieving efficient soluble expression of target proteins in E. coli, significantly reducing upstream production costs of recombinant protein drugs.
Advantages
Strong Soluble Expression
Achieves soluble expression of multi-disulfide and dimeric proteins in E. coli, avoiding inclusion body refolding challenges.
Significantly Lower Cost
E. coli expression host offers lower media, fermentation and purification costs than eukaryotic systems.
Short R&D Cycle
Fast-growing prokaryotic system with high screening efficiency enables rapid candidate expression and small-scale screening.
Easy Scale-Up
Robust expression system scales smoothly from shake flasks to pilot fermenters for industrialization.
Principle
UNK-Express performs directed design for difficult-to-express proteins, synergistically optimizing intracellular redox homeostasis and molecular chaperone regulation to reshape the intracellular microenvironment, providing proper folding conditions for multi-disulfide and homo/heterodimeric proteins, promoting precise disulfide pairing and dimer assembly, and avoiding inclusion body formation to directly obtain soluble target proteins.
Applications
The platform has successfully achieved soluble expression of multiple recombinant protein candidates with complex disulfide bonds and dimeric structures, solving the pain points of low expression, inclusion-body dominance and low refolding yield in conventional E. coli systems — greatly reducing downstream denaturation/refolding steps and shortening upstream development cycles.
