September 2018 Featured Report

Cell line development engineers in the biopharmaceutical industry juggle several, sometimes contradictory priorities. They must present their bioprocessing colleagues with a master cell line that can express a reproducibly high-quality protein product at titers and growth concentrations that will be high enough for manufacturing efficiency — and without those parameters degrading over time. Performing the first step in every bioprocess, these scientists must consider their own budgetary concerns and efficiencies while facing regulatory scrutiny under the 21st-century risk-management paradigm. In turn, they make demands on technology suppliers, asking, “Can we engineer our cell lines to obtain good productivity and genetic stability without screening so many clones? How do we best manage those screenings? What properties can we screen for? And how important is clonality, anyway?” The answers must come from biology enabled by improved instrumentation. This laboratory at cell-therapy company Cellectis is one...