Biotherapeutics have many promising applications, such as anti-cancer treatments, immune suppression, and vaccines. However, due to their biological nature, some biotherapeutics can be challenging to rapidly express and screen for activity through traditional recombinant methods. For example, difficult-to-express proteins may be cytotoxic or form inclusion bodies during expression, increasing the time, labor, and difficulty of purification and downstream characterization. One potential pathway to simplify the expression and screening of such therapeutics is to utilize cell-free protein synthesis. Cell-free systems offer a compelling alternative to in vivo production, due to their open and malleable reaction environments. In this work, we demonstrate the use of cell-free systems for the expression and direct screening of the difficult-to-express cytotoxic protein onconase. Using cell-free systems, onconase can be rapidly expressed in soluble, active form. Furthermore, the open nature of the reaction environment allows for direct and immediate downstream characterization without the need of purification. Also, we report the ability of a "just-add-water" lyophilized cell-fee system to produce onconase. This lyophilized system remains viable after being stored above freezing for up to one year. The beneficial features of these cell-free systems make them compelling candidates for future biotherapeutic screening and production.

a b s t r a c tThe engineering of and mastery over biological parts has catalyzed the emergence of synthetic biology. This field has grown exponentially in the past decade. As increasingly more applications of synthetic biology are pursued, more challenges are encountered, such as delivering genetic material into cells and optimizing genetic circuits in vivo. An in vitro or cell-free approach to synthetic biology simplifies and avoids many of the pitfalls of in vivo synthetic biology. In this review, we describe some of the innate features that make cell-free systems compelling platforms for synthetic biology and discuss emerging improvements of cell-free technologies. We also select and highlight recent and emerging applications of cell-free synthetic biology.

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Cell-free protein synthesis is a promising tool to take biotechnology outside of the cell. A cell-free approach provides distinct advantages over in vivo systems including open access to the reaction environment and direct control over all chemical components for facile optimization and synthetic biology integration. Promising applications of cell-free systems include portable diagnostics, biotherapeutics expression, rational protein engineering, and biocatalyst production. The highest yielding and most economical cell-free systems use an extract composed of the soluble component of lysed Escherichia coli. Although E. coli lysis can be highly efficient (>99.999%), one persistent challenge is that the extract remains contaminated with up to millions of cells per mL. In this work, we examine the potential of multiple decontamination strategies to further reduce or eliminate bacteria in cell-free systems. Two strategies, sterile filtration and lyophilization, effectively eliminate contaminating cells while maintaining the systems' protein synthesis capabilities. Lyophilization provides the additional benefit of long-term stability at storage above freezing. Technologies for personalized, portable medicine and diagnostics can be expanded based on these foundational sterilized and completely "cell-free" systems.

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