BeiGene chooses CHOZN for oncology drug development

Biopharma company BeiGene has entered a commercial sales and service contract with Sigma-Aldrich custom manufacturing services business unit SAFC Commercial. The company has purchased SAFC’s off-the-shelf, turnkey CHOZN cell line production platform and cell line engineering services to support discovery and commercial development of BeiGene’s targeted oncology drug.

Enabled by Sigma-Aldrich’s CompoZr Zinc Finger Nuclease (ZFN) gene editing technology, the CHOZN Platform allows for fast, simple selection and scale-up of high-producing clones for the production of recombinant protein drugs. Developed to provide an off-the-shelf production solution to biopharma developers who don’t currently have a cell line platform, the product consists of the CHOZN GS^-/- CHO cell line and an optimised set of cGMP-produced, chemically defined media and feeds that have been designed with the cell line to maximise production of r-proteins.

“The CHOZN Platform offers us a great deal of value through the ability to maximise the production of monoclonal antibodies and other recombinant-proteins used in our targeted oncology treatments,” said Dr Kang Li, head of biologics at BeiGene. “Reducing timelines are critical to every oncology development project. Our objective in selecting SAFC’s CHOZN Platform and services was to shorten bioproduction times in early development and to obtain a manufacturing clone quickly with the highest protein quality specifications.”

In addition to the cell line, media and feed, SAFC provides extensive user support which includes working together on protocols, from transfection through to scale-up in bioreactors, as well as comprehensive cell-line safety testing and development history. Kevin Gutshall, global senior manager of the CHOZN Platform for SAFC, said the product supports “efficient innovation and the highest quality therapeutics”.

“Users simply identify and clone the genes for their therapeutic protein of interest into the CHOZN expression vector and then employ the traditional cell line development strategies of transfection, selection and cloning,” he said. “The CHOZN Platform is designed to deliver a robust producing clone, ready for manufacturing.”