Accelerating patient access to novel biologics using stable pool‐derived product for non‐clinical studies and single clone‐derived product for clinical studies

Cell cloning and subsequent process development activities are on the critical path directly impacting the timeline for advancement of next generation therapies to patients with unmet medical needs. The use of stable cell pools for early stage material generation and process development activities is an enabling technology to reduce timelines. To successfully use stable pools during development, it is important that bioprocess performance and requisite product quality attributes be comparable to those observed from clonally derived cell lines. To better understand the relationship between pool and clone derived cell lines, we compared data across recent first in human (FIH) programs at Amgen including both mAb and Fc‐fusion modalities. We compared expression and phenotypic stability, bioprocess performance, and product quality attributes between material derived from stable pools and clonally derived cells. Overall, our results indicated the feasibility of matching bioprocess performance and product quality attributes between stable pools and subsequently derived clones. These findings support the use of stable pools to accelerate the advancement of novel biologics to the clinic. © 2017 The Authors Biotechnology Progress published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Institute of Chemical Engineers Biotechnol. Prog., 33:1476–1482, 2017