How willing are people to switch for new affinity purification tags?

[LukasJ]

Hello all,

Me and my supervisor have developed a new way to purify proteins. It's an affinity based method that used magnetic nanoparticles. We have been undertaking some market research to see at what scale this approach would be the most sensible to implement (e.g. large scale enzyme purification, medium scale high value biological production for pharmaceuticals or small-scale academic/RnD environments).

If I told you that we can:

• purify the proteins to the same degree or better than your current affinity purification system
• produce same or higher yields
• produce the proteins without affecting their native conformation (quality control)
• achieve this at a fraction of the cost (say compared to Ni-NTA resin and especially to magnetic Ni-NTA beads)

would you consider switching, or at least trying this method? The only caveat is that you would need to clone your proteins to include our tag (comparable length to standard tags)

We are basically trying to understand if it is feasible to expect protein purification experts to buy a product that expects them to change the tags that they are familiar with.

Let me know if you have any questions. It would be cool to have a chat!

[CharonY]

For large scale production I think industrial standards are limiting. Switching over a process is costly, and especially in pharma you need to recertify any change to the process. As a whole I suspect it would only be interesting if the cost savings would be massive while retaining all the other requirements.

For smaller scale application, I think it depends a lot on the individual researcher. If they have established routine protocols and all their product is already cloned, chances are that they might not be very interested in switching. Doubly so if at least part of their work requires re-validation/certification of their work.

For others, it may be more flexible but an important question then is (aside from the tag) the quality and work indeed comparable to established methods (often claims of purity/quality are inflated or best case scenarios). Are there downstream issues considerations due to buffer or particles being used? Also how much would one save per sample?

New methods are in principle always welcome, but some folks (me included) tend to be a bit more conservative with regard to jumping on a new product. Over the years too many have been around promising great benefits which fail to materialize when used and at some point one sticks to something that works alright. Our time budget for trying out new things can be a bit limited. 

[LukasJ]

Thanks for the thorough answer. Definitely validated some of my assumptions. 

I can't say at this point what the savings would exactly be per sample.

This sort of validates what I was thinking. In principle there is not resistance to new techniques, but it needs to proven to be worth it. 

Perhaps a focus should be on groups that already use magnetic resins as they are already benefiting from the ease of use enabled my magnetic collection. 

15 hours ago, CharonY said:

is (aside from the tag) the quality and work indeed comparable to established methods (often claims of purity/quality are inflated or best case scenarios)

I wonder if hypothetically we had a product that really does match/exceed quality and purity expectations of the end product, how would one go about in communicating that. Would it be thorough documentation in publications? Trade-show demonstrations and lab visits?

 

15 hours ago, CharonY said:

Are there downstream issues considerations due to buffer or particles being used? Also how much would one save per sample?

Shouldn't be any more issues than when using other affinity techniques. A desalting step (or even just a dilution as the eluent concentration is lower than Ni-NTA. 

[CharonY]

7 hours ago, LukasJ said:

I wonder if hypothetically we had a product that really does match/exceed quality and purity expectations of the end product, how would one go about in communicating that. Would it be thorough documentation in publications? Trade-show demonstrations and lab visits?

There a few typical routes folks take. One is publishing results in a journal (if not done already) but that is usually not enough, new methods are published almost hourly and it is difficult to stand out. Therefore companies often link up with research groups to test them under field conditions (so to speak) and have them endorse it. Ultimately, what you want is that they then use your products for their regular research and reference them in their papers. Smaller trade shows are a good way to get into contact with those groups (especially if you got someone with people as well as technical skills to go there) but larger ones are usually dominated by the heavy hitters.

Visiting labs is often as good, if not better to build contacts.

7 hours ago, LukasJ said:

Shouldn't be any more issues than when using other affinity techniques. A desalting step (or even just a dilution as the eluent concentration is lower than Ni-NTA. 

The first part should be validated with a critical sample. With eluent do you mean particles or the purified protein itself? Because a lower concentration can be problematic for some applications.