Cytovance, Celltheon partner to bolster mAb and protein production

Under the arrangement, Cytovance clients can access Celltheon's transient protein expression platform OmniCHO, SMART platform for stable clone development, as well as optimized pGL vectors and GOLDILOCKS transposase system.

Once upstream development is completed, Celltheon’s customers can transfer their products into downstream development for cGMP manufacturing at Cytovance’s mammalian facilities. There they can scale-up using 1000- and 2000-L bioreactors.

“For Cytovance this non-exclusive collaboration with Celltheon means that now customers will have more options for expressing their target protein and be able to seamlessly move their product to a development and manufacturing partner, all within the US. This partnership benefits the manufacturing of products expressed in Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cell lines,” a spokesperson for Cytovance told BioProcess Insider.

According to Celltheon, its SMART platform produces monoclonal antibody (mAb) pool titers of 7-15g/L and clone titers of 8-20g/L. This means that researchers can see within three to four weeks whether pools are performing at levels they would expect of stable clones and if they can expect further increases through standard subcloning and clone screening.

Moreover, OmniCHO is the first ‘Generation 3’ transient expression system that yields higher expression levels than the previously used CHO-S based transient expression systems. “This is a new transfection technology that enables greatly improved transfection efficiencies at higher cell densities,” the spokesperson added.

Meanwhile, Cytovance’s 1000 L and 2000 L mammalian single-use bioreactors are great for customers early in development. These scales are particularly well suited for targeted therapeutics as they move into late-stage clinical and commercial production phases that require larger lot sizes.

The spokesperson said, “Celltheon uses a protein-folding variant of CHO-K1, SUPERCELL, in combination with the heavily engineered GOLDILOCKS transposase to target expression cassettes to a minimum number of highly transcriptionally active locations resulting in increased productivity of mAbs and difficult to express proteins that can otherwise be challenging for CHO-K1 cells to fold and secrete effectively.”