Methods for protecting silica sorbents used in high-performance liquid chromatography from strongly adsorbed impurities during purification of human recombinant insulin

Gusarov, D. A.; Lasman, V. A.; Bayramashvili, D.

doi:10.1016/j.jchromb.2007.02.042

Cited by 6 publications

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“…Insulin fibrillation can cause significant complications in diabetes therapy, either directly due to injection site amyloidosis (Nilsson 2016;Dische et al 1988;Albert et al 2007;Yumlu et al 2009), or indirectly by decreasing the long-term stability of insulin formulations (Frokjaer and Otzen 2005;Brange and Langkjoer 1993). It is also a significant problem in industrial-scale production, where insulin aggregation leads to costly problems with column clogging during reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography purification (Gusarov et al 2007;Majors 2004). It is therefore important to understand the fibrillation of this protein, both to increase our understanding of insulinrelated amyloidosis, and to improve on existing industrial production procedures.…”

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Amyloid formation of bovine insulin is retarded in moderately acidic pH and by addition of short-chain alcohols

et al. 2020

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Protein aggregation and amyloid formation are associated with multiple human diseases, but are also a problem in protein production. Understanding how aggregation can be modulated is therefore of importance in both medical and industrial contexts. We have used bovine insulin as a model protein to explore how amyloid formation is affected by buffer pH and by the addition of short-chain alcohols. We find that bovine insulin forms amyloid fibrils, albeit with different rates and resulting fibril morphologies, across a wide pH range (2-7). At pH 4.0, bovine insulin displayed relatively low aggregation propensity in combination with high solubility; this condition was therefore chosen as basis for further exploration of how bovine insulin's native state can be stabilized in the presence of short-chain alcohols that are relevant because of their common use as eluents in industrial-scale chromatography purification. We found that ethanol and isopropanol are efficient modulators of bovine insulin aggregation, providing a three to four times retardation of the aggregation kinetics at 30-35% (vol/vol) concentration; we attribute this to the formation of oligomers, which we detected by AFM. We discuss this effect in terms of reduced solvent polarity and show, by circular dichroism recordings, that a concomitant change in α-helical packing of the insulin monomer occurs in ethanol. Our results extend current knowledge of how insulin aggregates, and may, although bovine insulin serves as a simplistic model, provide insights into how buffers and additives can be fine-tuned in industrial production of proteins in general and pharmaceutical insulin in particular.

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