Doubling The Speed Of Cell Line Development In A Large Pharmaceutical Company

The Cell Line Development (CLD) group at Janssen R&D (Spring House, PA) had been using the same two-step process to develop the final cell cultures for manufacturing new biologic drugs for the past 10 years. Using this process took 5 months to complete a project and the four-person team utilized ClonePix technology. However, the ClonePix screening process had to be repeated twice because the team couldn't demonstrate that each colony was derived from a single cell. They assumed the cells were evenly spaced, but could only be 95% certain that two cells hadn't landed close together or that when picking colonies the ClonePix picking tip had not touched another colony.

For this reason, the CLD team decided to look for an alternative to the ClonePix. After evaluating several technologies, they opted for Solentim's Cell Metric® CLD imaging and analysis system. Later, they also purchased the Verified In-Situ Plate Seeding (VIPS). The group has been very pleased with the impact of the VIPS on their processes, and they even purchased a second VIPS unit to increase capacity and enable groups to easily switch between the two VIPS units. Moving forward, they plan to utilize VIPS' capabilities in other ways as well.