Adaptation of cell lines to serum-free culture medium.

The optimum conditions to allow proliferation of cells for the secretion of some growth factors and cytokines and the proliferation of cells in different media that do not contain proteins or serum from animals (serum-free media) were investigated. The culture of cell lines for the commercial production of products involves optimisation of cell proliferation and secretion in media from which the requisite proteins can be economically extracted. Some of these problems were addressed in this study. We used two different clones from a human myeloma cell line for adaptation to serum free medium in order to characterize long-term effects of the new medium. We gradually decreased serum content of medium and the results showed that cell mortality increased with serum reduction, antibody production lost by survived clones, and secretion of cytokines were always retained.