Abstract: Culturing cells for the commercial production of proteins for diagnosis and therapy is a costly and time consuming process. The equipment required is expensive, and production cost are high. In order to provide commercially viable processes it is desirable to use cell lines which produce large quantities of product with each production run. However, most cells do not produce large quantities of desired product per se either because they do not produce a large quantity of product per unit of time (specific productivity) or because they do not survive long enough in the culture medium (time). Here, we identified that addition of a valproic acid compound to the culture medium increases overall (batch) yield and titer. More importantly, compared to the widely used sodium butyrate, batch yields using a valproic acid compound as a medium additive are significantly higher.

Abstract: Recombinant proteins are of great commercial interest. Yet, most current production methods in mammalian cells involve the time- and labor-consuming step of creating stable cell lines. Production methods based on transient gene expression are advantageous in terms of speed and versatility, yet, thus far, those methods have not shown the specific productivity, batch yield and volumetric yield to be an economic alternative to stable cell lines. The inventors improved on the methodology of transient transfection and achieved commercially relevant yields in terms of specific productivity (exceeding 35 pg per cell per day), batch yield (exceeding 700 mg/l) and volumetric yield.