US Patent 8216573 Process for the fermentative production of antibodies

The present invention relates to a process for producing a correctly folded and assembled full-length antibody using an E. coli strain, which comprises fermenting an E. coli strain which leaks periplasmic proteins into the medium, comprising a gene coding for the heavy chain of an antibody functionally linked to a signal sequence coding for a signal peptide, and a second gene coding for the light chain of an antibody, functionally linked to a signal sequence coding for a signal peptide, in a culture medium, where the E. coli strain secretes a full-length antibody into the culture medium, and the full-length antibody is removed from the culture medium.