Applications of recombinant Pichia pastoris in the healthcare industry

Since the 1970s, the establishment and development of the biotech industry has improved exponen-tially, allowing the commercial production of biopharmaceutical proteins. Nowadays, new recombi-nant protein production is considered a multibillion-dollar market, in which about 25 % of commercial pharmaceuticals are biopharmaceuticals. But to achieve a competitive production pro-cess is not an easy task. Any production process has to be highly productive, efficient and economic. Despite that the perfect host is still not discovered, several research groups have chosen Pichia pastoris as expression system for the production of their protein because of its many features. The at-tempt of this review is to embrace several research lines that have adopted Pichia pastoris as their ex-pression system to produce a protein on an industrial scale in the health care industry. Key words: yeast, heterologous expression system, recombinant protein, production, scale up