Background Information
Anything that is related to therapeutics typically means that it has something to do with the treatment of disease. Protein is a macronutrient that you’ll typically hear about in the fitness world due to the fact that protein is the macronutrient that helps build muscle. However, on a scientific level, protein are large, and complex molecules that do many things in the body. They help create new cells and carry out functions that need to take place within existing cells, they act signal senders in other parts of the body, and, most importantly for this article, they act as antibodies. Antibodies are the molecules that defend your body from disease. Now that we’ve broken down what it means to be therapeutic, and what protein is, let’s discuss what therapeutic proteins are and what they do.
What Therapeutic Proteins Do
Therapeutic proteins are manmade proteins that are used for medicine and have been found to be extremely useful for treating diseases. Therapeutic proteins are highly useful in comparison to a number of other treatment options for diseases for a number of reasons. Therapeutic proteins are specialized for use on specific issues. Because they are manmade they can be made specifically for use in a specific scenario. They’re also so micromanaged that they are unlikely to come with many side effects. Therapeutic proteins can also perform many of the other actions that proteins typically are able to do. They’re supposed to be able to perform these actions even better than normal proteins, but that wouldn’t be possible without a certain process that they have to undergo in the lab to make them this way.
Protein Purification
To ensure that therapeutic proteins act properly, they must undergo protein purification when they are being made. To explain protein purification in more simple terms, it is essentially a process in which certain proteins are isolated to ensure that they are the proper proteins for the job they need to perform. Typically, these proteins are taken from a large sample, and they need to be isolated because protein molecules aren’t uniform throughout any organism, so the separation process just ensure that you’re getting the right protein for the right job. Though this process typically ensures that the proteins that ultimately make it to a point where they become therapeutic proteins, it isn’t perfect, and is still being improved every day to make the application of therapeutic proteins more practical in other ways.
Conclusion
Therapeutic proteins have many uses for the medical field and will hopefully end up being used to their full potential in the near future when the purification process is perfected. With the ability to artificially create proteins for nearly any situation, therapeutic proteins have the potential to continue revolutionizing the medical field. With enough time to harness their power, it is impossible to predict how much therapeutic proteins will be able to do in the future. There are more purification processes being tested all of the time, and with that, hopefully a future where these therapeutic proteins are used in more situations.
