[Recombinant Antibodies and Their Employment in Cancer Therapy]. / Rekombinantní protilátky a jejich vyuzití v protinádorové terapii.

Development of recombinant therapeutic antibodies is recently one of the fastest growing disciplines of applied biomedical research. Recombinant monoclonal antibodies are increasingly applied in biological therapy of many serious human diseases and are currently an irreplaceable part of a comprehensive cancer therapy. First mouse therapeutic antibodies had only limited applicability due to the strong immune response; however, technological advances enabled engineering of antibodies with increased specificity and efficacy, and on the other hand with reduced adverse effects due to lower antigenicity. This review provides a summary of knowledge about recombinant therapeutic antibodies, their mechanism of action and approaches how to improve their efficacy.

[Protein expression and purification]. / Exprese a purifikace proteinu

Production of recombinant proteins is essential for many applications in both basic research and also in medicine, where recombinant proteins are used as pharmaceuticals. This review summarizes procedures involved in recombinant protein expression and purification, including molecular cloning of target genes into expression vectors, selection of the appropriate expression system, and protein purification techniques. Recombinant DNA technology allows protein engineering to modify protein stability, activity and function or to facilitate protein purification by affinity tag fusions. A wide range of cloning systems enabling fast and effective design of expression vectors is currently available. A first choice of protein expression system is usually the bacteria Escherichia coli. The main advantages of this prokaryotic expression system are low cost and simplicity; on the other hand this system is often unsuitable for production of complex mammalian proteins. Protein expression mediated by eukaryotic cells (yeast, insect and mammalian cells) usually produces properly folded and posttranslationally modified proteins. How-ever, cultivation of insect and, especially, mammalian cells is time consuming and expensive. Affinity tagged recombinant proteins are purified efficiently using affinity chromatography. An affinity tag is a protein or peptide that mediates specific binding to a chromatography column, unbound proteins are removed during a washing step and pure protein is subsequently eluted.

C-terminal phosphorylation of Hsp70 and Hsp90 regulates alternate binding to co-chaperones CHIP and HOP to determine cellular protein folding/degradation balances.

Heat shock proteins Hsp90 and Hsp70 facilitate protein folding but can also direct proteins for ubiquitin-mediated degradation. The mechanisms regulating these opposite activities involve Hsp binding to co-chaperones including CHIP and HOP at their C-termini. We demonstrated that the extreme C-termini of Hsp70 and Hsp90 contain phosphorylation sites targeted by kinases including CK1, CK2 and GSK3-ß in vitro. The phosphorylation of Hsp90 and Hsp70 prevents binding to CHIP and thus enhances binding to HOP. Highly proliferative cells contain phosphorylated chaperones in complex with HOP and phospho-mimetic and non-phosphorylable Hsp mutant proteins show that phosphorylation is directly associated with increased proliferation rate. We also demonstrate that primary human cancers contain high levels of phosphorylated chaperones and show increased levels of HOP protein and mRNA. These data identify C-terminal phosphorylation of Hsp70 and Hsp90 as a switch for regulating co-chaperone binding and indicate that cancer cells possess an elevated protein folding environment by the concerted action of co-chaperone expression and chaperone modifications. In addition to identifying the pathway responsible for regulating chaperone-mediated protein folding/degradation balances in normal cells, the data provide novel mechanisms to account for the aberrant chaperone activities observed in human cancer cells and have implications for the application of anti-chaperone therapies in cancer treatment.

[Hsp90--a target for anticancer therapy]. / Hsp90--cíl protinádorové terapie.

Molecular chaperones help other proteins to achieve and maintain their proper conformation. Chaperones bind to newly synthesized or unfolded polypeptide chains, actively modify their conformation and participate on their transport or degradation. Chaperones play an important role in cancer cell, where their increased activity enables stabilization of many mutant proteins and overcoming the stress generated by genetic instability. Hsp90 represents a key chaperone in cancer cells. Growth factor receptors, steroid hormone receptors and signal proctor teins are among its substrates, so-called client proteins; many of them being targets for anti-cancer therapy. Adverse conditions of the tumor microenvironment, such as hypoxia and nutrient deficiency, contribute to destabilization of proteins and further escalate dependence on chaperones. This is why molecular chaperones, in particular Hsp90, may represent a promising target for anticancer therapy. Importantly also, tumour-based Hsp90 has a significantly higher sensitivity to inhibitors than that in normal cells, and Hsp90 activity inhibition in tumours leads to a suppression of cellular signaling in many different oncogenic pathways. Several inhibitors of Hsp90 are currently undergoing clinical evaluation and new agents with different mechanisms of action are continually being identified.