Behaviour of GS-CHO Cell Lines in a Selection Strategy

Selection of a cell line with desirable growth and productivity kinetics is a critical path activity for first-in-human studies with new therapeutic proteins. Typically, programmes to develop a desirable cell line have multiple evaluation stages, where each stage has different growth conditions. At each stage, the results are used to reduce the number of cell lines taken further, by removing the lowest producers and those with unacceptable growth characteristics. Analysis of Lonza’s data for 9 cell line development programmes revealed a highly heterogeneous response of cell lines to their environment, which did not appear to be well predicted by earlier screens. This raised the question: is it possible that we are discarding the ‘best’ cell lines leaving ‘good’ cell lines? The work reported is part of a programme to determine how cell line selection strategies should be modified to increase the probability of identifying the ‘best’ cell lines.