For most people, "protein" is just a line on a nutritional information label. But many of the medicines developed through modern biotechnology—human insulin, vaccines, cancer treatments, and more—are based entirely on proteins.
The protein listed on nutritional information is generally a large, complex collection of hundreds or thousands of distinct molecules. Every protein in chicken muscle and fat cells, for example, undoubtedly falls on the "thousands" end of the spectrum, and that's before considering things like spliced variants and the common chemical modifications of proteins. In contrast, medicines have to be a single protein, largely pure of contaminants that can produce allergic reactions or other off-target effects. How do we get from thousands to one?
Since each protein is chemically distinct, isolating it takes advantage of its distinctive chemistry. Decades of biochemical research have left us with a number of ways to use that chemistry to separate out a protein from a mass of others. Biochemists, after all, need to isolate pure proteins to study their activities and structure—sometimes for fundamental research, and sometimes while on the road to developing a medicine. Fortunately, their methods have scaled up for industrial production.
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