(603f) CHO Cell Line Stability: Impact of Cell Banking

The CHO cell line is widely used as the workhorse for therapeutic protein production in the Biopharmaceutical industry. Identifying factors that impact the stability of CHO cell lines is crucial in ensuring robustness of cell line selection. To understand the impact of banking (one freeze-thaw cycle for primary seed bank generation) on CHO cell line stability, we studied 24 cell lines, producing 3 monoclonal antibodies  The experiments focused on understanding the change in cell culture Key Performance Indicators (KPI), product quality and flow cytometry characteristics after banking. Three rounds of shake flask studies were conducted over the course of three months to compare banked versus unbanked cells in parallel. For the 24 test case cell lines, we observed comparable cell culture KPI profiles, product quality attributes and flow cytometry profiles between banked and unbanked cell lines across the three sets of shake flask experiments.  From these experiments we were able to conclude that one round of banking (one freeze-thaw cycle) does not have an impact on stability of the 24 cell lines tested.