The three-year partnership will identify tools and methods to modify and optimise Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell line performance using GE Healthcare’s vector solutions and cell culture medium.
“We aim to find ways to improve the bioprocess relevant global phenotype or molecular machinery of host cells by tuning multiple cellular pathways simultaneously, and hence the activity of many individual genes,” Morgan Norris, general manager of Upstream and Cell Culture at GE Healthcare Life Sciences told Biopharma-Reporter.
While he said it is too early to give any specific numbers, the collaboration is expected to lead to significant cost and time-saving opportunities for GE’s biomanufacturing customers.
“Our goal is to reduce the time-consuming empirical, trial and error methods required to find the most optimal production cell clone and in the future, we could have a service, where our customers can choose the most optimal cell line for their product to increase speed, quality and yield.”
The partnership comes a month after GE teamed up with Edinburgh, UK-based synthetic biology firm Synpromics to try and increase protein yields achieved by its CHO cell line.
acib
The work itself will be carried out at acib, an R&D centre run by a consortium of Austrian-based universities and the non-academic Styrian Joanneum Research institute and funded by both industrial and public contributions.
“It is very important to find world class partners that can bring the right competence to these types of collaborative efforts with the end goal to deliver valuable solutions for our customers,” Norris said.
“We are keen to team up with acib, because it is a renowned institute and the team led by Nicole Borth has conducted world-leading research on how the genetic processes in the cell line work.”