Re-designing mammalian cells for biotechnology use: beyond just high yields

SCAN Seminar

Title: Re-designing mammalian cells for biotechnology use:  beyond just high yields

Speaker: Ana S. Coroadinha

Affiliation: Cell Line Development and Molecular Biotechnology Lab @ Animal Cell Unit

Abstract:

Mammalian cell lines have presently an effective monopoly over the production of complex therapeutic bioproducts. Over the last two decades the development of cell lines have undergone several advances allowing to improve their yields and cut the costs associated with this complex host.
Today’s most daunting challenges in the development of mammalian cells deal with the increasing demand for higher quality of increasingly complex bioproducts overcoming the timeline bottleneck associated with the establishment of stable cell lines that generally takes 6 to 12 months. The advances of new technologies on site specific integration, RNAi, fast sequencing, functional genomics, synthetic biology, among others, allowed higher cell engineering possibilities and aspire for finer tune cell re-design for high cell performance.
In this talk we will overview the current strategies and technologies used currently to optimize cell lines illustrating examples of the laboratory ongoing research, with special focus on the manufacturing of virus for vaccination and gene therapy.  Ongoing work projects includes: i) development of recombinase cassette exchange systems for fast establishment flexible cell lines; ii) development of robust mammalian cell lines for the production of improved retroviral vectors, understanding metabolic bottlenecks in virus assembly, iii) development of alternative cell lines for the manufacturing of non-human adenovirus for gene therapy; iv) improvement of human cell lines for vaccine production by silencing immunogenic host cell proteins that are incorporated in the viral particles reducing their efficacy. These subjects will be discussed.