In vitro Gluten Degradation Using Recombinant Eurygaster Integriceps Prolyl Endoprotease: Implications for Celiac Disease.

Background: Celiac disease (CD) is a gluten-sensitive chronic autoimmune enteropathy. A strict life-long gluten-free diet is the only efficient and accepted treatment until now. However, maintaining a truly gluten-free status is both difficult and costly, often resulting in a social burden for the person. Moreover, 2 to 5 percent of patients fail to improve clinically and histologically upon elimination of dietary gluten. Therefore, novel therapeutic approaches, including gluten degrading enzymes, are an unmet need of celiac patients.

Objectives: To evaluate the function of sunn pest prolyl endoprotease for gluten and gliadin hydrolysis in vitro.

Materials and methods: The spPEP was expressed as a recombinant protein in E. coli BL21 (DE3), and its catalytic activity was assessed by SDS-PAGE and RP-HPLC analyses.

Results: Production of a 100-kDa spPEP protein was confirmed by SDS-PAGE and western blot analysis. Also, we demonstrate that spPEP efficiently degrades gluten and α-gliadin (30-40 kDa) in vitro under conditions similar to the GI and is resistant to pepsin and trypsin.

Conclusion: The gathered data demonstrated that spPEP might be a novel candidate for Oral Enzymatic Therapy (OET) in CD and other gluten-related disorders.