Bernard Massie, R&D Director, NRC, to Speak at GTC’s Protein Expression Conf., Oct. 24-25, San Diego

San Diego, CA, September 10, 2013 --(PR.com)-- Bernard Massie, R&D Director of Antibody and Bioprocessing at the National Research Council of Canada will give a presentation at GTC’s Protein Expression, Purification & Characterization Conference on October 24–25, 2013 in San Diego, CA.

In order to cope with the growing demand for therapeutic protein production, expression systems are optimized to reduce the time of generation of stable clones and improve clone stability as well as the levels of protein secretion. This can be done by a combination of expression cassette optimization, cell and process engineering. Dr. Massie’s lab has previously developed the cumate gene-switch and shown that the cumate-inducible promoter (CR5) is the strongest promoter they have tested so far in CHO cells engineered to express optimal levels of cumate-regulated transactivators (CHOCum2). Recently, they have developed a new “GMP-ready” CHOBRI/Cum2 platform for generating stable pools expressing high levels of recombinant proteins. Following an optimized transfection protocol, these pools outperform pools generated by LV transduction. Their CHOBRI/Cum2 platform allows for generation of CHO pools stably expressing high-level of therapeutic proteins, between 200 to 500 mg/L (in batch), within less than 4 weeks post-transfection. Subcloning of the best CHOBRI/Cum2 pools, generated by transfection, increased productivity by 3 to 6-fold yielding clones producing up to 1.5 g/L (in batch). This platform is therefore more efficient than LV transduction for rapid production of therapeutic proteins in CHO cells and more readily amenable to biomanufacturing under GMP as it is based on an accepted stable cell line generation protocol.

Bernard Massie, Ph.D. is R&D Director of the Antibody and Bioprocessing department of the Human Health Therapeutics portfolio at National Research Council of Canada (NRC). His responsibilities are to manage resource allocation, budgeting and strategic planning of several teams deployed in goal-oriented research projects either internal or partnered with industry. He also leads the Biologics and Subsequent Entry Biologics Program whose main objective is to cover all aspects of biologic development from discovery up to pre-clinical testing in collaboration with industrial partners. He has published over 134 peer-reviewed papers and has 12 issued patents.

The Protein Expression, Purification & Characterization Conference will bring together experts from biotech, pharma, academia and the public sector to discuss the issues, challenges and opportunities in the field of protein expression and purification as it relates to therapeutic development. Topics of discussions will include novel expression platforms and systems, protein optimization, new purification methods, protein analytical tools, process development, scale-up and manufacturability.

For more information, please visit www.gtcbio.com/proteinexpression