Biopharmaceuticals

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.