Hello there!

Welcome to our first ever reagent blog!

I’m here to share our customer experiences with our CHO range of Insti Reagents (InstiGRO™, InstSHAKE™ and InstiTHAW™) and show you how you can improve your cell growth and viability. My aim is to help you accelerate your cell line development workflow; we know it can be a long one!

Today I’m going to be telling you all about our customer’s experience with InstiSHAKE CHO! Our customer wanted to improve their mAb expressing CHO-K1 cell line’s performance in fed-batch and reduce the number of clones lost during static to shaking culture expansion.  

How did they do this? Let’s start from the beginning… 

It all began when our customer single cell seeded their cell line into 96 well plates using VIPS™. BalanCD medium was supplemented with InstiGRO CHO, in addition to the customer’s routine outgrowth supplements. After 14 days culture, clones were assessed for IgG productivity (mg/L), and the top 96 clones were expanded to 24 well plates. 49 of the 96 clones were expanded using medium supplemented with InstiSHAKE CHO, while the remaining were expanded using the customer’s standard protocol. 

After 6 days in 24 well plates, clone productivity was further assessed, and the top 48 clones were expanded to 6 well plates (24 with and 24 without InstiSHAKE). Productivity was again assessed, and the top 37 clones were expanded from 6 well to 50mL spin tubes (18 clones from the control and 19 clones from the InstiSHAKE group). Once the clones had been expanded from 50mL spin tubes to shake flasks, clones were evaluated for productivity during a 14-day fed-batch experiment with Dynamis media (Gibco) and 3% Cell Boost 7a/7b feeds (HyClone). 

Now for the exciting part…the results!

The cells simply loved InstiSHAKE CHO! With higher viability (%) and higher viable cell density (cells/mL), the InstiSHAKE clones excelled during the fed batch experiment (see Figures 1 and 2). 

Furthermore, the number of clones that survived the expansion from static to shaking culture increased in the presence of InstiSHAKE. Let’s home in on this…. 12 out of 19 clones expanded to shaking culture with instiSHAKE successfully transitioned with high viable cell density. By comparison, of the 12 control clones which survived expansion, 6 suffered with very low viable cell density (see Figure 3).

This is certainly something to try if you haven’t already.

Who doesn’t want to help their clones survive the expansion process and boost their peak viable cell density?

Anyway, that’s enough from me for now, thanks for reading guys, I’ll be back next month!

Fig.1

Figure 1. Shows the average viability of the 18 clones expanded from the control group and 19 clones expanded from the InstiSHAKE group at each time point. Error bars show the standard deviation between clone viabilities.

Fig.2

Figure 2. Shows the average viable cell density (cells/mL) for the 18 clones expanded from the control group and 19 clones expanded from the InstiSHAKE group. Error bars show the standard deviation between clone viable cell densities.

Fig.3

Figure 3. Shows the number of clones which were successfully expanded from static to shaking culture. Of the successfully expanded clones, those which suffered with low viable cell density (<0.7×10⁶cells/mL) are presented. The total number of clones lost is also presented.