Efficient Production of sTNFRII-gAD Fusion Protein in Large Quantity by Use of the Modified CHO-S Cell Expression System

作者:Cai, Qinzhen; Zhao, Ai; Yin, Yuting; Ma, Lisha; Jiao, Zhenzhen; Zhi, Huilin; Lai, Shouhua; Cheng, Sha; Yang, Hongmei; Lu, Yinxiang*; Siminovitch, Katherine A.; Gao, Jimin
来源:PLos One, 2014, 9(10): e111229.
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0111229

摘要

TNF alpha is one of the initial and important mediators to activate downstream signaling pathways by binding to trimerized TNF alpha receptors (TNFR), and thus is an ideal drug target for cancer therapy. Taking advantage of intrinsic homotimerization of the globular domain of adiponectin (gAD), we have developed a novel TNF alpha antagonist, the trimerized fusion protein named sTNFRII-gAD. However, our previously-used CHO expression system yielded less than 10 mg/L of sTNFRII-gAD. To produce large quantities of sTNFRII-gAD efficiently, we used a modified CHO-S cell expression system, which is based on a pMH3 vector with non-coding GC-rich DNA fragments for high-level gene expression. We obtained stable clones that produced 75 mg/L of sTNFRII-gAD in the 96-well plate, adapted the clones to 40 ml suspension serum-free batch culture, then optimized the culturing conditions to scale up the fed-batch culture in a 3 L shake-flask and finally in a 5 L AP30 bioreactor. We achieved a final yield of 52 mg/L of sTNFRII-gAD. The trimerized sTNFRII-gAD exhibited the higher affinity to TNF alpha with a dissociation constant (Kd) of 5.63 nM than the dimerized sTNFRII-Fc with a Kd of 13.4 nM, and further displayed the higher TNF alpha-neutralizing activity than sTNFRII-Fc (p<0.05) in a L929 cytotoxicity assay. Therefore, the strategy employed in this study may provide an efficient avenue for large-scale production of other recombinant proteins by use of the modified CHO-S cell expression system.