Lonza, Cellectis reach milestone in development of newly bioengineered cell line

Cellectis bioresearch, the genome customization specialist and a commercial subsidiary of Cellectis (Alternext: ALCLS), and Lonza, a world leader in biotechnology production, announce today that they have reached a significant milestone in the development of a newly bioengineered cell line.

Using their proprietary meganuclease technology, Cellectis bioresearch successfully managed to deactivate ("knock-out") the cell-based glutamine synthetase (GS) in CHO-K1SV, Lonza's proprietary host cell line. This achievement comes as part of an overall strategic plan to further advance the GS Gene Expression System™ offering and is expected to contribute to shortened development timelines critical for the early phases of bioproduction.

"We are very pleased to deliver Lonza's engineered cell line ahead of time and to demonstrate the great potential of meganucleases for knock-outs in the bioproduction field," said Dr. Christophe Delenda, CSO of Cellectis bioresearch.

"Removal of the cell-based GS activity will enable Lonza to make further improvements to its proprietary GS Gene Expression System™ and shorten development timelines via accelerated selection of highly productive clones and increased productivities," said Dr. Richard Alldread, Head of Technology Development and Strategic Projects, Lonza Development Services. "Lonza aims to have the new cell line available for services and licensing in late 2011."

Lonza's proprietary technology, the GS Gene Expression System™, uses selection via glutamine metabolism to rapidly generate high-yielding and stable recombinant cell lines. Hundreds of cell lines using the GS System™ have already been created to generate therapeutic proteins for clinical trials and in-market supply. Removal of the cell-based GS activity will enable further improvements to be made to the selection process for creating highly productive recombinant cell lines.