SAFC® Strengthens Biopharmaceutical Position With Innovations to Established CHOZN® Portfolio

Sigma-Aldrich Corporation 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 optimization 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 commercialization."

The CHOZN® portfolio consists of the CHOZN® Platform (CHOZN® GS-/- CHO cell line and an optimized set of cGMP-produced, chemically defined (CD) media and feeds), additional CHOZN® ZFN-modified cell lines, ZFN reagents, and customization 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.