SAFC Strengthens Biopharmaceutical Position with Innovations to Established CHOZN Portfolio

Sigma-Aldrich Corp. has announced that SAFC Commercial, its custom manufacturing services business unit, has engineered additional traits into its CHOZN Platform cell line, increasing the utility of the CHOZN portfolio of products and services.

Two novel host cell lines have been added to the CHOZN portfolio, yielded through SAFC’s continuous research and development. The first of these lines is the CHOZN GS-/- host trait stacked with a knockout of the MGAT1 gene function that results in early termination of the N-glycan pathway and enables the expression of recombinant proteins with homogeneous high Man5 glycan profiles. This is useful for protein crystallography studies, as well as for the expression of biotherapeutics that target mannose receptors.

The second novel cell line is the CHOZN GS-/- host trait stacked with knockouts of the CMAH and GGTA gene sequences. The knockout of the function of these two genes enables the expression of recombinant proteins that do not contain the antigenic alpha-gal and Neu5Gc moieties on the glycan structures and makes them capable of producing potentially safer therapeutic proteins. These two newly engineered CHO host cells, as well as the parental CHO-K1 cell line, are now commercially available from SAFC as custom products.

“The additional traits and unique combination of the CHOZN platform and media/feed optimisation services provide a best-in-class offer, with continuous advances to the customer,” said Kevin Gutshall, Senior Manager for Marketing and Commercial Licensing. “SAFC’s CHOZN Portfolio, in combination with Sigma-Aldrich’s robust intellectual property on the Zinc Finger Nuclease (ZFN) technology, provides CHOZN customers with a seamless gateway from development through commercialisation.”

The CHOZN portfolio consists of the CHOZN Platform (CHOZN GS-/- CHO cell line and an optimised set of cGMP-produced, chemically defined (CD) media and feeds), additional CHOZN ZFN-modified cell lines, ZFN reagents, and customisation options including cell line and media development projects. Powered by Sigma-Aldrich’s CompoZr ZFN technology, SAFC’s cGMP-produced and tested CHOZN GS-/- cell line was the first commercially available glutamine synthetase (GS) knockout CHO line on the market. The CHOZN GS-/- platform provides a GS-/- cell line that enables streamlined selection, identification and scale-up of high-producing manufacturing clones, saving weeks of development time. In addition, the lean CD media and feed system allows for tunable product quality.