Application of liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry-based protein and proteomic analytical approaches to chinese hamster ovary cell based industrial biopharmaceutical production

Abstract

Therapeutic proteins have emerged rapidly over the past several decades, providing effective and innovative medicines for a wide range of previously refractory human diseases. Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells have become the predominant choice as the cellular expression system for such therapeutic production in the biopharmaceutical industry. The high throughput of the protein drug production depends on both the efficient upstream process yielding high product titers and proficient downstream purification with high product recovery and effective impurity removal. Numerous efforts have been made at both of the up- and down-stream processes of CHO-based manufacturing to improve productivity. Although advances have been achieved, many challenges remain. The underlying biology of CHO cell productivity has not been fully understood due to an incomplete biological picture, hampering the efforts of cell cultivation optimization. Moreover, it is challenging to apply the results of cell cultivation development received from the bench-top scale to large scale production bioreactors, since different behaviors of the CHO cell are frequently observed with different bioreactor types and sizes. At the same time, efficient downstream purification is also essential to ensure drug product quality. Considering the potential safety risks to patients, the identification and quantitation of impurity residues in therapeutic proteins, especially host cell proteins (HCP), is of great importance but challenging due to the bulk drug product background. New analytical technologies and strategies which can be applied to the therapeutic protein production process are needed.