Integrated Strategies For Simplifying CHO Bioprocessing

If you work in CHO bioprocessing, you've probably accepted certain costs and headaches as unavoidable. Dipeptide feeds for cysteine and tyrosine. Perfusion systems to manage inhibitory byproducts. Upstream and downstream teams stepping on each other. Media that performs beautifully at 2 L and falls apart at 200 L. This collection challenges all of that.

Pfizer's Bhanu Chandra Mulukutla explains how metabolic engineering — specifically overexpressing PAH and PCBD1 for tyrosine prototrophy, and GNMT, CBS, and CTH for cysteine prototrophy — eliminates the need for supplemental feeds while addressing trisulfide formation and disulfide scrambling. His BCAT1 knockout work goes further: cells consumed 30% fewer branched-chain amino acids, achieved higher peak densities, and in some cases made perfusion unnecessary.

Susan Sharfstein, Ph.D., from the University at Albany offers a different angle, arguing that discovery-driven multiomics reveals what hypothesis-driven research misses. Her RNA-seq and proteomics work on A0 versus A1 CHO cell lines showed ribosomal protein upregulation at the protein level without corresponding mRNA changes — the kind of finding that changes how you think about cell line engineering.

The upstream-downstream integration section, drawing on perspectives from Sanofi, Somatek, Immunome, and others, makes the case that process locks and shared goals aren't soft management advice: they're how you avoid expensive rework and build a design space you can actually defend.

TheraPRO® CHO Media System data rounds out the picture, with scalability demonstrated from 15 mL to 200 L and mAb titers of 4.5 to 5.3 g/L across vessel sizes.

Download now to bring these strategies into your own CHO development programs.