The Coming Age of Insect Cells for Manufacturing and Development of Protein Therapeutics

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Abstract
Protein therapeutics is a rapidly growing segment of the pharmaceutical market. Currently, the majority of protein therapeutics are manufactured in mammalian cells for their ability to generate human-like glycoproteins important for safety and efficacy. The high cost of using mammalian cells for manufacturing has motivated a constant search for alternative host platforms. Insect cells have begun to emerge as a promising candidate, largely due to the development of the baculovirus expression vector system (BEVS). While there are continuing efforts to improve insect-baculovirus expression for producing protein therapeutics, key limitations including cell lysis and the lack of homogenous humanized glycosylation still remain. The field has started to see a movement toward virus-less gene expression approaches, notably the use of CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) to address these shortcomings. This review highlights recent technological advances that are realizing the transformative potential of insect cells for the manufacturing and development of protein therapeutics.
Funding Information
  • NIH Office of the Director (OD020053)
  • Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental and Transport Systems (1645229, 1653611, 1511720)

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