Inhibition of Apoptosis In Mammalian Cell Culture

Abstract

When J.F. Enders first used primate cells to produce poliomyelitis virus in 1949, a multi-billion dollar industry was born. The realization that viruses could be attenuated in vitro for use as vaccines initiated attempts to develop large scale cultures of mammalian cells. In the 1970’s, two discoveries led to the expanded use of such cultures: (1) the advent of recombinant DNA technology meant that cell lines could be engineered to overexpress heterologous genes, and (2) the development of hybridoma cell lines provided a system capable of continuously secreting antibodies (Kohler and Milstein, 1975). Today, dozens of products including virus vaccines, antibodies, interferons, immunoregulators, hormones, and growth factors are manufactured by mammalian cells in culture; this number promises only to increase as our understanding of cellular processes grows.