September 8, 2010: RecipharmCobra Biologics has been granted European and US patents for its novel plasmid maintenance system oriSELECT. Classically, genes of interest are inserted into plasmids with antibiotic resistance genes and then inserted into E. coli with antibiotics present. Only those E. coli cells that contain the inserted genes and the antibiotic resistance genes will survive to produce plasmids or proteins. oriSELECT will, on the other hand, enable the production of plasmids or proteins in E. coli without the requirement for antibiotics in the medium or for plasmid selection and maintenance. This will avoid some of the problems associated with the conventional selection method including loss of the plasmid from the cell during cell division (which can reduce product yield), product contamination with antibiotics, and the potential transfer risk of antibiotic resistance genes to pathogens, which could result in the generation of ‘superbugs’. Therefore technologies that prevent the use of antibiotics and their resistance genes could have a significant commercial and regulatory advantage.
The invention of oriSELECT puts RecipharmCobra in the position of owning the only two plasmid maintenance systems, including ORT (Operator-Repressor Titration), that are free of the burden of expressed selectable marker genes.
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