Low-molecular-weight heparin represent a significant advancement in anticoagulant therapy with enoxaparin being a prominent example obtained exclusively through the fragmentation of porcine intestinal heparin. However, escalating demand and limited resources have raised concerns about enoxaparin supplementation. The current challenge involves exploring alternative heparin sources for large-scale enoxaparin production with bovine intestinal heparin emerging as a promising option. Our study demonstrates that enoxaparin derived from the available bovine heparin preparation differs significantly from the reference compound. Yet, the implementation of a straightforward purification step yields a preparation termed "high-anticoagulant bovine heparin". Fragmentation of this purified product through β-elimination produces enoxaparin akin to the standard from a porcine origin. To ensure physicochemical similarity, we employed various spectroscopic, enzymatic, and chromatographic tests to compare the new bovine-derived enoxaparin with the original porcine compound. Biological activity was confirmed through in vitro coagulation assays and assessments using an animal model of venous thrombosis. Our study affirms that the β-elimination reaction cleaves the bovine heparin chain without preferential breaks in regions with different sulfation patterns. Additionally, we scrutinized decasaccharides purified from enoxaparin preparations, providing a comprehensive demonstration of the similarity between products obtained from porcine and bovine heparin. In summary, our findings indicate that an enoxaparin equivalent to the original porcine-derived product can be derived from bovine heparin, given that the starting material undergoes a simple purification step.
© 2024 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society.