Biopharmaceuticals: A Study of Apoptosis and Cell Cycle to Augment Transfection Efficiency in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) Cells

In the biopharmaceutical industry, essentially, there are three components that play the main role in producing biopharmaceutical products, the host cell, the expression vector and the bioreactor and/or production environment. To produce the highly valued and desired products, the choice of a suitable host is one of the most important aspects. The host required is not only required to produce the desired product, but also needs to demonstrate robustness in a bioreactor system. Constantly facing challenges in a bioreactor, cells often undergo apoptosis, a well-known limiting factor in biopharmaceutical production, which ultimately leads to low yield of valuable protein(s). We have genetically engineered a CHO-K1 cell line to constitutively express human insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) and murine polyoma large T-antigen (PyLT-Ag) to generate Super-CHO and CHO-T respectively, two cell lines that can potentially serve different niches in the biopharmaceutical industry.