Protein Library

Five Prime's proprietary technology was specifically developed to solve the problem of capturing cDNAs (copies of expressed genes) with intact 5 prime ends. Generally, protein collections are generated from cDNAs, which actively direct the production of protein and can reproduce in the laboratory the same protein that is made in the body. However, if one end of the cDNA, called the 5 prime end, is not present, the protein cannot be made. The 5 prime end is the most difficult part of the expressed gene to copy with traditional technology generally available to scientists. Accordingly, we believe our collection of cDNAs is more complete than those collections developed by other companies that were not able to capture the 5 prime end of many genes.

Our library is derived from more than 100 distinct human tissues, and comprises more than 5,700 human proteins.

Our library contains proteins that are full-length, structurally complete and biologically active, and it is now the basis of our discovery platform.  The library is derived from more than 100 distinct human tissues, and comprises more than 5,700 human proteins, which we believe represents substantially all of the body’s medically important targets for protein therapeutics and an abundant source of potential future protein drugs. It includes the proteins that form the basis of marketed blockbuster protein drugs, such as Lantus® (insulin glargine), Herceptin® (trastuzumab) and Humira® (adalimumab), which we believe validates the utility of the platform. In addition, it contains thousands of other proteins, including novel protein variants that are not disclosed in the public domain.

The difficulty of producing large numbers of new proteins in a functional form presents a limitation in the discovery of new protein drugs. Our high-throughput protein production system includes proprietary technologies developed over several years that allow us to produce approximately 2,000 different proteins per week at therapeutically relevant amounts and with a high level of consistency. We produce the proteins for our cell-based screening system using human cells, to ensure the proteins are made in the same correct, functional form in which they are made in the human body. Our technologies enable us to reliably produce our entire protein library in less than three weeks. In contrast, typical methods producing one or a few proteins at a time would take years to produce a library of this size and would have to be repeated for each target discovery screen.