GE Healthcare has formed a three-year research partnership with the Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology (acib) for developing cell-line engineering that will bring increased productivity for biomanufacturing. The goal of the partnership is to explore and identify tools and methods to modify and optimize the performance of the Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell line, the most commonly used host for industrial production of therapeutic proteins.

GE Healthcare and acib will seek to reduce the need for clone screening, recognize tools for cell-line engineering, and gain knowledge about what cellular mechanisms determine cell-line efficiency. In the first phase, the collaboration will focus on performing basic research in this area, but in the long-term, the work could lead to creation of a pre-engineered host cell-line library.

Source: GE Healthcare