Comparative Characteristics of Biotechnological Approaches to Obtaining Recombinant Human Cytokines in Bacterial Expressing Systems

Background. Cytokines provide a link between cells and play an important role in the innate and adaptive immune response modulation. As mediators, they are active in very small amounts and effect many biological processes: embryonic development, nonspecific and specific immune responses, changes in cognitive function, to name a few. Recombinant microorganisms are commonly used to produce cytokine preparations. Perspectives of therapeutic use of recombinant cytokines make it urgent to create new and improve existing technologies for their biosynthesis, isolation and purification.Objective. The purpose of the paper is analysis and comparison of biotechnological approaches for the production of human recombinant cytokines, based on current literature, and identifying promising ways to improve the efficiency of their production technologies.Methods. The analysis and systematization of modern scientific works devoted to the production of recombinant cytokines with determination of peculiarities of the course of their biosynthesis process and to carry out comparative characteristics of different producers.Results. Most often, to obtain recombinant cytokines, Escherichia coli based expression systems are used, as they are the best-studied to allow high yield of the target product. Their biosynthesis, as a rule, is carried out by a method of periodic fermentation with nutrition, and to the composition of the nutrient medium can be added stimulants of biosynthesis of different origin. Bacterial producers have several disadvantages: the accumulation of the target protein is most often in the form of Taurus inclusions, and the question remains of contamination of such drugs with bacterial endotoxins. To negate these drawbacks, they resort to optimizing the procedures for isolating and purifying recombinant proteins.Conclusions. One of the promising areas of current research on the production of recombinant cytokines is the various technologies for obtaining the target protein in soluble form. However, the complexity of this task lies in the lack of the ability to create a universal method and requires an individual approach, depending on the producer and the final product. Also promising are studies to increase the yield of the target protein by changing the culture conditions and composition of the nutrient medium, eliminating endotoxin infection, and finding alternative bacterial expression systems.