Surfactant treatment for neonatal respiratory distress syndrome has dramatically improved survival of preterm infants. However, this has resulted in a markedly increased incidence of sequelae such as neonatal chronic inflammatory lung disease. The current surfactant preparations in clinical use lack the natural lung defence proteins surfactant proteins (SP)-A and D. These are known to have anti-inflammatory and anti-infective properties essential for maintaining healthy non-inflamed lungs.

Supplementation of currently available animal derived surfactant therapeutics with these anti-inflammatory proteins in the first few days of life could prevent the development of inflammatory lung disease in premature babies. However, current systems for production of recombinant versions of SP-A and SP-D require a complex solubilisation and refolding protocol limiting expression at scale for drug development.

Using a novel solubility tag, we describe the expression and purification of recombinant fragments of human (rfh) SP-A and SP-D using Escherichia coli without the need for refolding. We obtained a mean (± SD) of 23.3 (± 5.4) mg and 86 mg (± 3.5) per litre yield of rfhSP-A and rfhSP-D, respectively. rfhSP-D was trimeric and 68% bound to a ManNAc-affinity column, giving a final yield of 57.5 mg/litre of highly pure protein, substantially higher than the 3.3 mg/litre obtained through the standard refolding protocol. Further optimisation of this novel lab based method could potentially make rfhSP-A and rfhSP-D production more commercially feasible to enable development of novel therapeutics for the treatment of lung infection and inflammation.