Haruki Hasegawa Speaks on Russell Body Phenotype at Protein Expression Conf., Oct. 24-25, San Diego

San Diego, CA, October 01, 2013 --(PR.com)-- Haruki Hasegawa, Principal Scientist of Therapeutic Discovery at Amgen, will be speaking on “A Simple Phenotypic Screening to Identify Manufacture-friendly IgG Clones Based on the Unique Russell Body Inducing Propensity of Individual Clones” at GTC’s Protein Expression, Purification & Characterization Conference on October 24–25, 2013 in San Diego, CA

Russell bodies (RBs) are intracellular aggregates of immunoglobulins that cannot be secreted or degraded. RBs formation in the endoplasmic reticulum takes place in vivo in various B lymphoproliferative disorder patients as well as in vitro during recombinant IgG overexpression using heterologous cell hosts such as 293 and CHO cells. In a published work, Dr. Hasegawa has shown that individual human IgG clones possess distinctive RB inducing propensities that can surface differently under normal and abnormal cellular conditions. While some IgG clones had very low RB-inducing propensity and resulted in high level protein secretion, biosynthetically challenging IgG clones exhibited higher propensity to induce RBs and typically resulted in low secretion output. In this talk, Dr. Hasegawa will highlight the impact of differential RB-inducing propensities among individual IgG clones and illustrate the potential value of RB detection phenotypic assays to assess IgGs' overexpression fitness to guide lead candidate selection and lead optimization by protein engineering.

Haruki Hasegawa, Ph.D., is a molecular cell biologist studying the processes of in vivo protein folding and the intracellular protein trafficking events in mammalian cells. He is interested in elucidating cargo-specific biosynthetic mechanisms for broad classes of proteins and is motivated to find out the maximum levels of protein synthesis and secretory pathway functions. Translating the findings into high level recombinant protein expression strategies and effective assay methods have been the important goals of his research. In Amgen, Haruki not only works closely with therapeutic area scientists and technology/methodology experts to advance early stage pipeline, but also collaborates with process development scientists to characterize biopharmaceuticals and the stable cell lines.

The Protein Expression, Purification & Characterization Conference brings together experts from biotech, pharma, academia and the public sector to discuss the issues, challenges and opportunities in the field of protein expression and purification as it relates to therapeutic development. Topics of discussions will include novel expression platforms and systems, protein optimization, new purification methods, protein analytical tools, process development, scale-up and manufacturability.

For more information, please visit www.gtcbio.com/proteinexpression