BeiGene chooses SAFC's CHOZN Platform to support oncology drug development

Sigma-Aldrich^® Corporation (NASDAQ: SIAL) today announced that SAFC^® Commercial (www.sigma-aldrich.com/safc), its custom manufacturing services business unit, has entered a commercial sales and service contract with leading 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," said Dr. Kang Li, Head of Biologics from BeiGene. "Reducing timelines are critical to every oncology development project. Our objective in selecting SAFC's 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 Senior 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 customers on protocols - from transfection through to scale-up in bioreactors, as well as comprehensive cell-line safety testing and development history.