Antibody production

The clinical and commercial success of monoclonal antibodies has led to the need for very large-scale production in mammalian cell culture. This has resulted in rapid expansion of global manufacturing capacity [1], an increase in size of reactors (up to 20,000 L) and a greatly increased effort to improve process efficiency with concomitant manufacturing cost reduction. This has been particularly successful in the upstream part of the process where productivity of cell cultures has improved 100 fold in the last 15 years. This success has resulted from improvements in expression technology and from process optimisation, especially the development of fed-batch cultures. In addition to improving process/cost efficiencies, a second key area has been reducing the time taken to develop processes and produce the first material required for clinical testing and proof-of-principle. Cell line creation is often the slowest step in this stage of process development. This article will review the technologies currently used to make monoclonal antibodies with particular emphasis on mammalian cell culture. Likely future trends are also discussed.