An Efficient Approach to Cell Culture Medium Optimization — A Statistical Method to Medium Mixing

One of the most challenging aspects of culturing recombinant Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cell clones is providing for the diverse nutritional requirements that are unique to every transfected cell line. In order to minimize the amount of time required for medium development, we have recently developed CHO Medium Optimization Kit I (Product Code CH0001). This kit consists of six diverse animal component-free CHO media (including two chemically defined media) to provide for a wide range of nutritional requirements. The format of this kit provides multiple media to screen, and functions as a platform for statistical medium optimization by using a three-point mixing design. After screening several different recombinant CHO clones against the six media, our data showed that we could increase cell growth and recombinant protein production over the original medium. Following a statistical approach provided by Design-Expert (R) computer software, we mixed the top three performing media and were able to further increase cell growth and productivity. The data can be further analyzed by Design-Expert (R) to yield a predicted best medium mixture to support maximum cell growth and productivity for a particular recombinant CHO clone. Our data strongly suggests that using CHO Medium Optimization Kit 1 with a combination of media screening and a statistical approach to media mixing, can facilitate the development of an optimized medium for any given recombinant CHO clone.