Cytheris

Pierre Cortez

Brigitte Assouline

Michel Christian Morre

Anne Gregoire

The present invention relates, generally, to the fields of immunology and molecular biology. The invention discloses, more particularly, new and improved interleukin-7 drug substances, corresponding specific immunoreactive antibodies, as well as compositions comprising the same, their preparation and uses. The invention also discloses methods to characterize the impurity profile of a r-hIL-7 drug substance used for therapeutic purpose, as well as optimized nucleotide sequences encoding mammalian IL-7, recombinant expression vectors and methods for preparing and purifying said polypeptides. The present invention stems from the unexpected discovery that the long term activity of recombinant IL-7 is mostly expressed by a specific conformer and that other conformers, potential product-related substances, product-related impurities, and process-related impurities, which would normally be included in the specification of the drug substance and/or drug product, although bioactive, should be strictly minimized because they are able to trigger an immune reaction against the desired IL-7 molecule.

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Paris, France

Pierre Cortez