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Research

Overview

Over the past decade, the scale of the biopharmaceutical market has grown due to the improvement of development and production processes. Also, the emergence of new biopharmaceuticals and biosimilars is accelerating the development of the production cell line. Among the various mammalian cells used for the production of biopharmaceuticals, Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cell is in the spotlight occupying more than 60% because it possesses various advantages in terms of safety and bioprocess. For instance, the post-translational modification (PTM) processes of CHO cell are similar to humans so that it has little immunogenicity in the case that it was injected into humans. In addition, an adaptation of CHO cell in serum-free media and production on a large-scale is easier than the other cell lines relatively. In spite of these advantages, the cell line development using mammalian cells has some difficulties; not only it requires enormous time and labor, but also recombinant cell lines made by development processes have shown instabilities of gene expression. Therefore, our laboratory desires to accelerate market growth by solving these problems with cell engineering and process engineering.

Cell Engineering

Focusing on improvements of production by the mammalian cells in terms of cell engineering, our laboratory has studied strategies developing high-producing CHO cell lines and resolving problems of cell line instabilities. Furthermore, we have been conducting various research for improving the productivity and product quality of CHO cell lines incorporating cell biology, genetics, transcriptomics, and bioinformatics.

Process Engineering

​Culture process conditions such as nutrients in the cell culture media, temperature, pH, hydrodynamic stress, and by-products(lactate and ammonium) accumulation, and so on. should be managed for biopharmaceutical production. These factors influence cell growth, productivity, and product quality by adjusting metabolisms and signaling pathways in the recombinant CHO (rCHO) cell. Therefore, our laboratory is conducting research to find optimal culture process conditions for biopharmaceutical production.

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