In a recent Nature Communications paper titled “Multiplex secretive engineering enhances recombinant protein production and purity”, scientists from the Technical University of Denmark and the University of California, San Diego, describe their work to create a “clean” CHO cell line which greatly reduces the amount of unnecessary host cell proteins (HCPs) present throughout the production of monoclonal antibodies.
This has important implications for the future of the manufacturing of recombinant proteins, because HCPs have substantial metabolic costs to production cell lines. Furthermore, a reduction on HCPs could reduce the number of steps necessary in downstream processing of recombinant proteins, for example possibly eliminating the need for an expensive protein A affinity capture step. You can read a “Behind the Paper” blog post by lead author Stefan Kol to learn more.