Director of Service:

Moro, Ana Maria PhD PqC VI

Team:

Rodrigues, Maria Teresa Alves, PhD Scientific investigator)

Garbuio, Angélica (student of master's degree)

Melo, Fernanda Lima Souza (estudante de iniciação científica)

Novo, Juliana Branco (student of scientific initiation)

Taga, Noemi Morimatsu (student of master's degree)

Batista, Silmara Aparecida (assistant of laboratory)

Bertolino, Dirceu Carlos (technician)

Oliveira, José Marcelino (technologist)

Oliveira, Sonia de F. Gomes (assistant of laboratory)

Pires, Neide Campos (assistant of laboratory)

Silva, Edson Luiz (technician)

Silva, Maria José (assistant of laboratory)

Targino, Roselaine Campos (biologist)

General Objective of the Unit:

Within projects initiated in the Biotechnology Unit, was derived the Biomedicine Laboratory in Animal Cell, in October 2001, a consequence of the achieved development condition. The control of technologies related to the animal cells cultivation in a large scale, aims to produce synthesized biomedicines through these cells.

Nowadays, the unit is directed to the acquisition of Recombinant Human Erythropoietin and Monoclonal Antibodies. Mammal cells has a very high potential as a way of producing biologically active biomedicines, in which many of them, due to the complexity of their structure, cannot be produced in systems of bacteria and yeasts.

Recent research lines:

Erythropoietin is a glycoprotein hormone that regulates the number of erythrocytes in the blood. In the adults, it is mainly produced by the kidneys in response to the decrease of the circulating red blood cells and oxidative processes. It plays an important role within the proliferation, differentiation and lineage surviving of the red blood cells. Diseases which involve the renal parenchyma result in the synthesis suppression of the erythropoietin, causing anemia of variable severity, as well as being very intense. 

The gene of the human erythropoietin was cloned and transfected in CHO cells, in which, through their cultivation, synthesize the hormones. The erythropoietin is purified from the supernatant of the culture. The ones benefited to use it, are patients with renal chronic problems, patients under chemo or radiotherapy and patients with AIDS.

Monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) produced by hybrodomes created in laboratory, can be used in immunotherapy, being one of the major uses of acute rejection control in organ transplant. For this purpose, the useful MAbs are those that recognize specific determinants within the surface of cells involved in the rejection processes, such as anti-CD3, anti-CD18 (also for the control inflammatory processes) and anti-CD4, potentially useful to induce tolerance. For being of murina origin, the MAbs anti-CD3 and anti-CD18 are being humanized.