Minicircle Biopharmaceuticals–An Overview of Purification Strategies

Minicircles are non-viral delivery vectors with promising features for biopharmaceutical applications. These plasmid-derived circular DNA molecules that obtained in vivo Escherichia coli by the intramolecular recombination of a parental plasmid, which generates minicircle containing eukaryotic therapeutic cassette interest and miniplasmid prokaryotic backbone. The production process results thus complex mixture, hinders isolation from other molecules. Several strategies have been proposed over years to meet challenge purifying obtaining high quality minicircles compliance regulatory guidelines use. In purification, characteristics strain plasmid used impact strongly affect purification strategy can be applied. This review summarizes different methods developed so far, focusing not only on method itself but also its dependence upstream used.