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China's BeiGene Selects SAFC CHOZN® Platform for Commercial Drug Development

Sigma-Aldrich Corporation
2015-03-11 19:00 4897

ST. LOUIS, March 11, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Sigma-Aldrich® Corporation (NASDAQ: SIAL) today announced that SAFC® Commercial (www.sigma-aldrich.com/safc), its custom manufacturing services business unit, entered a commercial sales and service contract with leading Chinese biopharmaceutical company, BeiGene (www.beigene.com). Located in Beijing, the innovative oncology company purchased SAFC's off-the-shelf, turnkey CHOZN cell line production platform and cell line engineering services to support discovery and commercial development of BeiGene's targeted oncology drug.

"The CHOZN Platform offers us a great deal of value through the ability to maximize the production of monoclonal antibodies and other recombinant-proteins used in our targeted oncology treatments," commented Dr. Kang Li, Head of Biologics from BeiGene. "Time is of the essence for every project. Our goal in selecting the CHOZN Platform and services was to shorten bioproduction times in early development and to obtain a manufacturing clone quickly with the highest protein quality specifications."

"Following last year's first commercial placement of the GS-/- CHO cell line in the Asian markets, SAFC is seeing significant interest in using our CHOZN recombinant cell line development platforms in the region," said Kevin Gutshall, Global Sr. Manager of the CHOZN Platform for SAFC. "The CHOZN Platform supports efficient innovation and the highest quality therapeutics. It offers a turnkey solution that is unmatched in the industry. Users simply identify and clone the genes for their therapeutic protein of interest into the CHOZN expression vector, and then employ the traditional cell line development strategies of transfection, selection and cloning. The CHOZN Platform is designed to deliver a robust producing clone - ready for manufacturing."

Enabled by Sigma-Aldrich's, CompoZr® Zinc Finger Nuclease (ZFN) gene editing technology, the first commercially available glutamine synthetase (GS) knockout CHO line was brought to market in 2011. The full CHOZN Platform includes the CHOZN GS-/- CHO cell line and an optimized set of cGMP-produced and chemically defined media and feeds. In addition to the cell line, media, and feed, SAFC provides extensive user support which includes working with customer on protocols - from transfection through to scale-up in bioreactors, as well as comprehensive cell-line safety testing and development history.

For more information about the CHOZN Platform, visit: http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/safc-choznplatform.

©2015 Sigma-Aldrich Co. LLC. All rights reserved. Sigma-Aldrich and SAFC are trademarks of Sigma-Aldrich Co. LLC or its affiliates, registered in the U.S. and other countries.


Source: Sigma-Aldrich Corporation
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