Shortening the Biologics Clinical Timeline with a Novel Method for Generating Stable, High Producing Cell Pools and Clones

Abstract

Reducing drug development timelines is an industry-wide goal to bring medicines to patients in need more quickly. This was exemplified in the COVID-19 pandemic where reducing development timelines had a direct impact on the number of lives lost to the disease. The use of drug substance produced using cell pools, as opposed to clones, has the potential to shorten development timelines. Toward this goal, we have developed a novel technology, GPEx® Lightning, that allows for rapid, reproducible, targeted recombination of transgenes into more than 200 Dock sites in the CHO genome. This allows for rapid production of high expressing stable cell pools and clones that reach titers of 4 to 12 g/L in generic fed-batch production. These pools and clones are highly stable in both titer and glycosylation, showing strong similarity in glycosylation profiles.