A Danish company says they’ve found a way in helping to stop cells from “micro-evolving” during manufacturing to produce fewer monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). Enduro Genetics, which specializes in synthetic biology, says they’ve developed genetic plugins featuring biosensors and promoters that can detect and regulate mAb production levels in cells.
“The reason why cells differentiate during a process is because they don’t want to be high producing from an evolutionary perspective,” explains Peter Rugbjerg, PhD, CSO, and founder of Enduro. “We flipped the problem around to make it to the cell’s advantage to be highly productive, and this drives evolution to become a positive.”
According to Rugbjerg, Enduro’s technology is based on burden-responsive promoters. These act as intracellular biosensors that detect the production level of cells and then use this transcriptional signal to regulate a gene essential to the cell.
Gene regulation changes the composition of available cells to contain more high producers, increasing the average production of the cells overall, he says. The technology can also be used to encourage adaptive evolution, improving cellular performance over a long production run.
Rugbjerg claims that Enduro Genetics is the only company currently taking this approach. “We started out in 2014 and, through that, secured patent protection,” he notes.
The company spoke at the Bioprocessing Summit Europe. According to Rugbjerg, this was to raise awareness of Enduro and start a conversation within the industry. “It’s been a long journey to launching a radical new technology,” he tells GEN. “When we started out in our research, we had to convince people who told us micro-evolution didn’t happen within the scale of industrial bioprocesses. Now it’s widely accepted.”
Enduro Genetics is now beginning conversations with other companies about how they handle these challenges and is seeking out new opportunities for their technology.
The post Synthetic Biology Encourages Cells to Keep on Producing appeared first on GEN - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
“The reason why cells differentiate during a process is because they don’t want to be high producing from an evolutionary perspective,” explains Peter Rugbjerg, PhD, CSO, and founder of Enduro. “We flipped the problem around to make it to the cell’s advantage to be highly productive, and this drives evolution to become a positive.”
According to Rugbjerg, Enduro’s technology is based on burden-responsive promoters. These act as intracellular biosensors that detect the production level of cells and then use this transcriptional signal to regulate a gene essential to the cell.
Gene regulation changes the composition of available cells to contain more high producers, increasing the average production of the cells overall, he says. The technology can also be used to encourage adaptive evolution, improving cellular performance over a long production run.
Rugbjerg claims that Enduro Genetics is the only company currently taking this approach. “We started out in 2014 and, through that, secured patent protection,” he notes.
The company spoke at the Bioprocessing Summit Europe. According to Rugbjerg, this was to raise awareness of Enduro and start a conversation within the industry. “It’s been a long journey to launching a radical new technology,” he tells GEN. “When we started out in our research, we had to convince people who told us micro-evolution didn’t happen within the scale of industrial bioprocesses. Now it’s widely accepted.”
Enduro Genetics is now beginning conversations with other companies about how they handle these challenges and is seeking out new opportunities for their technology.
The post Synthetic Biology Encourages Cells to Keep on Producing appeared first on GEN - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.