Antibodies are proteins with sugars attached to them, and are emerging as a major class of drugs in the treatment of cancer.

In order to enhance their effectiveness, researchers have been scrambling to find ways to enhance the potency of such antibodies.

The new development process involves using yeast to produce antibodies with human sugar structures.

"By controlling the sugar structures on antibodies we have shown that their ability to kill cancer cells can be significantly improved and that proteins can be optimised," said Huijuan Li, the associate director of analytical development at >GlycoFi.

"This work demonstrates, for the first time, that an antibody with human sugar structures can be produced in a non-mammalian host," says Tillman Gerngross, GlycoFi's chief scientific officer at >Dartmouth's Thayer School.

In addition to enhancing antibodies, the new process can also applied to optimise any therapeutic glycoprotein.

The therapeutic protein market is expected to grow at over 20 per cent annually over the next decade and glycoproteins are a large part of this market, accounting for about 70 per cent of all approved therapeutic proteins, according to the researchers.

"GlycoFi's achievement has broad potential application to the development of new and improved therapeutics," said Joseph Helble, Dean and Professor at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering.

The findings of the Dartmouth/GlycoFi team will be published in the February issue of >Nature Biotechnology.