Recombinant Human Erythropoietin Production in Chinese Hamster Ovary Cells Is Enhanced by Supplementation of α-Helix Domain of 30Kc19 Protein

Hyeonjin Cha,Ju-Hyun Park

doi:10.3390/app112211009

Abstract

The enhancement of recombinant therapeutic protein production in mammalian cell culture has been regarded as an important issue in the biopharmaceutical industry. Previous studies have reported that the addition of the recombinant 30Kc19 protein, a silkworm-derived plasma protein with simultaneous cell-penetrating and mitochondrial enzyme-stabilizing properties, can enhance the recombinant protein expression in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell culture. Here, we produced an α-helix N-terminal domain of 30Kc19, called (30Kc19α), and investigated its effects on the production of human erythropoietin (EPO), a widely used therapeutic protein for the treatment of anemia, in recombinant CHO cell culture. Similar to the full-length 30Kc19, 30Kc19α was able to be mass-produced in a form of recombinant protein through an Escherichia coli expression system and delivered into EPO-producing CHO (EPO–CHO) cells. Supplementing the medium of EPO–CHO cell culture with 30Kc19α increased the intracellular NADPH/NADP+ ratio related to the flux of metabolic reducing power for protein biosynthesis, subsequently enhancing EPO production in serum-free culture. 30Kc19α is considered to have certain advantages in the downstream purification process of therapeutic protein production when it is used as a medium supplement due to its small size and low isoelectric point compared to the full-length 30Kc19. These results suggest that 30Kc19α has potential use for manufacturing biopharmaceutical proteins.

Highlights

Human insulin, the world’s first genetically engineered drug, was approved by the U.S Food and Drug Administration in 1982
Recombinant proteins produced from Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells exhibit similar glycosylation profiles to original human proteins, which is an important advantage as a platform for the production of therapeutic proteins due to the correlation between the glycan structures of glycoproteins and in vivo activities [7,8,9]
Production yields per unit culture scale for purified 30kc19α and 30Kc19 were different (23.35 ± 2.51 mg/L and 47.43 ± 8.53 mg/L, respectively), the molar productivity of 30kc19α was similar to that of 30Kc19 when it was converted into moles in consideration of the molecular weights (MWs) difference between the two proteins (Figure 1d)

Summary

Introduction

The world’s first genetically engineered drug, was approved by the U.S Food and Drug Administration in 1982. Biopharmaceuticals are drug products synthesized or extracted from living organisms (including humans). The Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell line is a widely used mammalian cell line for the production of recombinant therapeutic proteins [5]. To improve the time integral of viable cell concentration and/or the specific productivity of a foreign protein, the optimization of various culture conditions (such as pH, dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide, temperature, and osmolality [10,11,12,13]) and genetic engineering (including the overexpression of antiapoptotic proteins such as Bcl-xL, cell cycle-promoting, cyclin-dependent kinase homologs, and endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-resident chaperones [14,15,16]) have been studied extensively

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