RNA-Seq: A Transcriptomics Approach to Understanding Protein Production in CHO Cells

Recombinant therapeutic proteins are widely used to treat life-threatening diseases including cancer. Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells have been used for over 25 years in the biopharmaceutical industry to produce recombinant therapeutics, where CHO cells produce almost one in three of the manufactured recombinant therapeutics. CHO cell lines are the preferred host for protein expression due to their ability to produce human-compatible protein glycosylation, mediate protein folding, ease of culturing in large-scale bioreactors and protein expression stability. However, several limitations exist in CHO cell bioprocessing, including low protein yields and genome instability, resulting in high market prices of the biopharmaceuticals. Here, we discuss using RNA transcriptomics on cells grown under varying industry relevant conditions to discover genes that are important to the protein production process by increasing stabilization. This knowledge has the potential to decrease the costs of medicines through the minimization of waste products in the CHO culturing procedure.