Early integration of Design of Experiment (DOE) and multivariate statistics identifies feeding regimens suitable for CHO cell line development and screening

From Efficiency to Yield: Exploring Recent Advances in CHO Cell Line Development for Monoclonal Antibodies

The increasing demand for biosimilar monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) has prompted the development of stable high-producing cell lines while simultaneously decreasing the time required for screening. Existing platforms have proven inefficient, resulting in inconsistencies in yields, growth characteristics, and quality features in the final mAb products. Selecting a suitable expression host, designing an effective gene expression system, developing a streamlined cell line generation approach, optimizing culture conditions, and defining scaling-up and purification strategies are all critical steps in the production of recombinant proteins, particularly monoclonal antibodies, in mammalian cells. As a result, an active area of study is dedicated to expression and optimizing recombinant protein production. This review explores recent breakthroughs and approaches targeted at accelerating cell line development to attain efficiency and consistency in the synthesis of therapeutic proteins, specifically monoclonal antibodies. The primary goal is to bridge the gap between rising demand and consistent, high-quality mAb production, thereby benefiting the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries.

Soft-sensors application for automated feeding control in high-throughput mammalian cell cultures

The ever-increasing demand for biopharmaceuticals has created the need for improving the overall productivity of culture processes. One such operational concept that is considered is fed-batch operations as opposed to batch operations. However, optimal fed-batch operations require complete knowledge of the cell culture to optimize the culture conditions and the nutrients feeding. For example, when using high-throughput small-scale bioreactors to test multiple clones that do not behave the same, depletion or overfeeding of some key components can occur if the feeding strategy is not individually optimized. Over the recent years, various solutions for real-time measuring of the main cell culture metabolites have been proposed. Still, the complexity in the implementation of these techniques has limited their use. Soft-sensors present an opportunity to overcome these limitations by indirectly estimate these variables in real-time. This manuscript details the development of a new soft-sensor based fed-batch strategy to maintain substrate concentration (glucose and glutamine) at optimal levels in small-scale multi parallel CHO cultures. Two alternatives to the standard feeding strategy were tested: an OUR soft-sensor-based strategy for glucose and glutamine (Strategy 1) and a dual OUR for glutamine and CO₂ /alkali addition for glucose soft-sensor strategy (Strategy 2). The results demonstrated the applicability of the OUR soft-sensor based strategy to optimize glucose and glutamine feedings, which yielded a 21% increase in final viable cell density (VCD) and a 31% in erythropoietin (EPO) titer compared with the reference one. However, CO2/alkali addition soft-sensor suffered from insufficient data to relate alkali addition with glucose consumption. As a result, the culture was overfed with glucose resulting in a 4% increase on final VCD, but a 9% decrease in final titer compared to the Reference Strategy. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Clever Experimental Designs: Shortcuts for Better iPSC Differentiation

For practical use of pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) for disease modelling, drug screening, and regenerative medicine, the cell differentiation process needs to be properly refined to generate end products with consistent and high quality. To construct and optimize a robust cell-induction process, a myriad of cell culture conditions should be considered. In contrast to inefficient brute-force screening, statistical design of experiments (DOE) approaches, such as factorial design, orthogonal array design, response surface methodology (RSM), definitive screening design (DSD), and mixture design, enable efficient and strategic screening of conditions in smaller experimental runs through multifactorial screening and/or quantitative modeling. Although DOE has become routinely utilized in the bioengineering and pharmaceutical fields, the imminent need of more detailed cell-lineage specification, complex organoid construction, and a stable supply of qualified cell-derived material requires expedition of DOE utilization in stem cell bioprocessing. This review summarizes DOE-based cell culture optimizations of PSCs, mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), and Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells, which guide effective research and development of PSC-derived materials for academic and industrial applications.