Selection methods for high-producing mammalian cell lines.

The selection of high-producing mammalian cell lines represents a bottleneck in process development for the production of biopharmaceuticals. Traditional methods are time consuming (development times often exceed six months) and significantly limited by the number of clones that can be feasibly screened. The market for therapeutic proteins is set to double by 2010, so there is an increasing need to develop methods for the selection of mammalian cell lines stably expressing recombinant products at high levels in an efficient, cost-effective and high-throughput manner. Alternatives include higher throughput methods based on flow-cytometric screening and recently developed automated systems for the selection of high-producing cell lines.