Organism and condition-specific promoters for optimal expression vector

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Cell culture systems for production of recombinant proteins have seen a strong development since the early 2000’s. In CHO cells, the working horse for the production of therapeutic proteins, antibody production levels have increased from less than 0.5 gr/l in 2003 to an average of 4 gr/l today, peaking at double that at times. Nonetheless, alternative cell lines have been developed in view of specific valuable characteristics. However, these systems require different approaches to improve production levels and process. These are relatively young commercial platforms, hence have seen less development time and effort. Production yields are therefore lagging those of CHO cells and are not always at economically viable levels. Improving expression vectors with organism and condition-specific promotors can impact yields for these systems significantly.

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Our standard screening approach relies on an initial genome-wide SuRE™ screen in a cell-line system. This allows us to identify approximately 100 promising candidate promoters and enhancers from an exhaustive screen of the entire genome. In a next round another exhaustive screen is performed for all potential combinations (of 2) of all 100 elements. This we refer to as the ‘hybrid’ screen and the optimal promoter/enhancer combination resulting from this screen is then transferred for use in your expression vector.
 

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