Genome Scale Flux Balance Metabolic Models for recombinant CHO cells

A large number of therapeutics used to treat a wide range of diseases are recombinant proteins that require mammalian cells as a host for their commercial production. Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell lines are the most preferred host cells for the production of a variety of biotherapeutics ranging from interferons to antibodies. The increasing demand to treat a variety of diseases has necessitated the need to increase the overall productivity of these therapeutic proteins. A bottleneck in improving the productivity of recombinant biotherapeutics from mammalian cultures is the accumulation of inhibitory by-products like lactic acid. The objective of the present work is to use flux-balance analysis methods on a genome-scale metabolic model of CHO cells to devise ways to control lactate switch in a recombinant cell line producing the receptor binding domain of the SARS-COV2 virus.