Over the past 20 years, we have seen significant improvements in product titres from 50 mg/l to 5-10 g/l, a more than 100-fold increase. The main methods that have been employed to achieve this increase in product titre have been through the manipulation of culture media and process control strategies, such as the optimization of fed-batch processes. An alternative means to increase productivity has been through the engineering of host cells by altering cellular processes. Recombinant DNA technology has been used to over-express or suppress specific genes to endow particular phenotypes. Cellular processes that have been altered in host cells include metabolism, cell cycle, protein secretion and apoptosis. Cell engineering has also been employed to improve post-translational modifications such as glycosylation. In this article, an overview of the main cell engineering strategies previously employed and the impact of these strategies are presented. Many of these strategies focus on engineering cell lines with more efficient carbon metabolism towards reducing waste metabolites, achieving a biphasic production system by engineering cell cycle control, increasing protein secretion by targeting specific endoplasmic reticulum stress chaperones, delaying cell death by targeting anti-apoptosis genes, and engineering glycosylation by enhancing recombinant protein sialylation and antibody glycosylation. Future perspectives for host cell engineering, and possible areas of research, are also discussed in this review.

X-box binding protein 1 (XBP-1) is a key regulator of the cellular secretory pathway and unfolded protein response (UPR). It has been shown that the spliced form of XBP-1, XBP-1S, functions as a transcription activator and up-regulates many genes associated with protein secretion and biosynthesis of endoplasmic reticula. Since the production of some recombinant proteins is widely believed to be limited by the secretory capacity of the host cell, an increase in protein production may be achieved by overexpressing XBP-1S. In this study, the effects of XBP-1S on the productivity of monoclonal antibody (MAb), interferon gamma (IFNgamma), and erythropoietin (EPO) are examined in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) and NS0 cell lines. Results show that XBP-1S may become a determinative factor only when accumulation of recombinant proteins exceeds the secretory capacity of the host cell. In transient transfection systems where a bottleneck in protein secretion was achieved, overexpression of XBP-1S improved protein titers by up to 2.5-fold. In contrast, overexpression of XBP-1S had no detectable effects on protein productivity of stable cell lines that did not exhibit any secretory bottleneck. We conclude that overexpression of XBP-1S is an effective strategy in enhancing recombinant protein production when the secretory pathway of the host cell is saturated by high-level synthesis of recombinant proteins.