The Great Leader Comrade
"It is important for the biotechnology sector to exert efforts to develop cell engineering, gene engineering, microbiology and other branches of modern biology, and apply the achievements of modern biology to agriculture, stockbreeding, medical science and the food industry, so as to be able to produce high-yield crops and new varieties of domestic animals as well as a large quantity and variety of quality medicines and foodstuffs."
Researchers of Institute of Medical Genetics in Pyongyang Medical College of
IFNs are the bioactive proteins that have the potent antiviral and immunomodulatory activity. They are secreted by leucocytes and/or fibroblasts infected by viruses and by lymphocytes stimulated by antigens and/or mitogens and induce antiviral state and cellular immune response. There are several subtypes of IFNs. Among them, IFN-α is widely used for the treatment of many viral diseases including hepatitis B and C, herpes zoster and influenza, and some kinds of cancerous diseases such as breast cancer, leukemia and melanoma.
Researchers conducted the profound study on the gene expression in E. coli based strictly on the Juche principle and explored the transcription and translation enhancers which can increase the transcription and translation efficacy by several times than those in the previous vectors respectively and inserted them to the upstream and downstream of λPL promoter to make the new E. coli gene overexpression vector. They also replaced the codons of hIFN-α2b gene with synonymous ones that are well used in E. coli cells to increase the expression level of IFN by E. coli expression system by thousands times of that of the previous domestic E. coli IFN expression strain. This made the breakthrough in the realization of large scale production of IFN. They also established the procedures for the solubilization of IFN inclusion bodies, the high-rate refolding and high purity purification of solubilized IFN. By doing so, they could produce one million ampules of IFN-α2b for intramuscular injection and sent them to many hospitals and made a great contribution to the improvement of people's health. Now production of IFN is kept on the normal basis and other types of formulae including pills and external remedy are made and applied to more fields with less side effect and physical burden.
Researchers were awarded the supreme scientific prize "February 16 Science and Technology Prize" of the DPRK for the establishment of the system for the production of biodrugs by the biotechnological methods for the first time in our country.
They are near the completion of the study to make the new efficient modified IFN which can decrease the dosage and extend the administration period to one week by decreasing the degradation in the body through chemical modification of IFN.
