Alexander S. Kurdyumov

Importancia para la hirudoterapia

Alexander S. Kurdyumov is a Russian molecular biologist at the Federal Research and Clinical Center of Physical-Chemical Medicine in Moscow whose published research concerns the salivary proteins of the medicinal leech, above all destabilase-lysozyme (mlDL), a multifunctional i-type enzyme from leech salivary gland secretion that displays isopeptidase, muramidase and antibacterial activities and acts on stabilised fibrin through isopeptidolysis of the ε-(γ-Glu)-Lys bonds that cross-link its polypeptide chains. In 2015 he and colleagues (Manuvera, Baskova, Lazarev) optimised the expression, isolation and purification of the three known isoforms in Escherichia coli, obtaining 30 mg of product per litre of culture, and reported the first demonstration of fibrinolytic activity by recombinant mlDL; only intact proteins were active, which the authors took to indicate an enzymatic basis and a mechanism different from that of common thrombolytics (PMID 26589324). A companion study expressed isoform 2 in E. coli, Pichia pastoris and the human cell line Expi293F and found that soluble forms carried lysozyme, isopeptidase and fibrinolytic activities several to ten times greater than protein refolded from inclusion bodies (PMID 26277552). He was also among the authors of the 2020 draft genome of Hirudo medicinalis and the salivary transcriptomes of three closely related medicinal leeches (PMID 32349672). Claims of crystal structures, industrial partnerships or clinical trials of destabilase are not supported by these records and are not made here.