Fusion to Albumin as a Means to Slow the Clearance of Small Therapeutic Proteins Using the Pichia pastoris Expression System

Of the numerous strategies that have been tested to slow the clearance of injected protein drugs from the body and circulation (1), fusion to albumin offers several advantages. Albumin is the most abundant protein in mammalian plasma and one of the longest lived. It lacks posttranslational modifications, with the exception of extensive disulfide bonding (2). If albumin can be fused in-frame with a therapeutic protein as a single-chain …