ADAPTATION OF CHOLESTEROL REQUIRING NS CELLS TO SERUM FREE CULTURE CONDITIONS

Colorectal cancer is the third most common form of cancer and the second leading cause of cancer-related death in the Western world. The answers to such life threatening diseases and cancers are monoclonal antibodies (MAb’s) which are widely used as therapeutic agents. World demand for currently approved MAb’s is on the order of a few kilograms per year. However, new therapeutic MAb’s are under development and require doses of several hundred milligrams to a gram over the course of therapy. Very often to cater for the special requirements for the growth of mammalian cells, serum is added to the cell culture medium. However, removal of serum from the cell culture medium is often carried out, especially if the end product is to be used for human consumption, in order to eliminate various disadvantages such as high physiological variability, high batch to batch variability, risk of contamination and high cost, and challenges posed in the downstream processing of the product. In this paper, the adaptation of cholesterol requiring NS0 cells to commercially available serum free media is presented.