Life Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ: LIFE) and ProBioGen AG today announced the availability of Gibco® Freedom™ Cell Line Development Kits, a new line of royalty-free products that integrate cells, reagents, culture media and protocols to bring simplicity and flexibility, eliminating up to two months in the earliest stages of new biological drug development. These kits make it easier and faster to bring new molecules to the market.
Life Technologies' new kits can reduce the time from transfection to stable cell line production, from six to four months, making unprecedented use of a single, optimized, animal-free culture medium throughout the entire development process. This eliminates the need for multiple time consuming and complicated media adaptation steps.
"Life Technologies' cell line development kits showcase our ability to integrate proprietary technologies into simple, innovative solutions that accelerate the pathway from molecule to market," said Mark Stevenson, President and Chief Operating Officer of Life Technologies. "Our royalty-free Freedom™ kits enable faster early stage development, and allow customers to focus on what they do best—developing new biologics to treat diseases."
The Freedom™ CHO-S™ and DG44 Kits provide biopharmaceutical drug development teams with key components for biotech and pharmaceutical companies to rapidly and systematically generate Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cell lines to produce clinical and commercial biologic pharmaceuticals. CHO cells have been engineered to express recombinant proteins as therapeutics for a wide range of diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, anemia, multiple sclerosis, cancer and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and are a critical part of the $20 billion bioproduction market, which represents nearly 20 percent of biopharmaceutical revenue, according to a report from ScientiaAdvisors.
Life Technologies' Freedom™ CHO-S™ Kit was developed in collaboration with ProBioGen AG. The Freedom™ DG44 Kit was developed by Life Technologies. Both kits include fully-documented cGMP cell lines and animal origin-free workflows to take researchers from gene transfection to the generation of a stable clone. Commercial licensees obtain a detailed information package with the applicable cell line's lineage and testing history, to facilitate rapid IND (investigational new drug) filing with the US Food and Drug Administration prior to performing Phase I clinical trials.
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