Taha Salim

and 3 more

Chemically defined (CD) media are routinely used in the production of biologics in Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cell culture and provide enhanced raw material control. Nutrient optimized CD media is an important path to increase cell growth and monoclonal antibody (mAb) productivity in recombinant CHO cell lines. However, nutrient optimization efforts for CD media typically rely on multi-factorial and experimental design of experiment (DoE) approaches or complex mathematical models of cellular metabolism or gene expression systems. Moreover, the majority of these efforts are aimed at amino acids since they constitute essential nutrients in CD media as they directly contribute to biomass and protein production. In this study, we demonstrate the utilization of multi-variate data analytics (MVDA) coupled with amino acid stoichiometric balances (SBs) to increased cell growth and mAb productivity in efforts to reduce CD media development efforts. SBs measure the difference between theoretical demand of amino acids and the empirically measured fluxes to identify metabolic states of the cell. When coupled with MVDA, the statistical models were not only able to highlight key amino acids towards cell growth or productivity, but also provided direction on metabolic favorability of the amino acid. Experimental validation of our approach resulted in a 55% increase in total cell growth and about an 80% increase in total mAb productivity. Increased specific consumption of stoichiometrically balanced amino acids and decreased specific consumption of glucose was also observed in optimized CD media suggesting favorable consumption of desired nutrients and a potential for energy redistribution towards increased cellular growth or mAb productivity.