High-density transient gene expression in suspension-adapted 293 EBNA1 cells

Large-scale transient gene expression (TGE) in mammalian cells is an attractive method to rapidly produce recombinant proteins for pre-clinical studies, with some processes reported to reach 100 L. However, the yield remains low, hardly over 20 mg protein/L, mainly because the current TGEs have been performed at low cell density (approximately 5 x 10(5) cells/mL). In this study, the strategy to improve TGE focuses on facilitating transfection at high cell density. A high-density perfusion culture of 293 EBNA1 cells was established in 2-L bioreactor using Freestyle 293 expression medium (Invitrogen, Singapore) to grow the cells for transfection. Transfection was then carried out at 1 x 10(7) cells/mL using polyethylenimine (PEI) as DNA carrier, at the optimized conditions of 6 microg DNA/10(7) cells and 1:3 DNA to PEI mass ratio. During the post-transfection phase, 80.8 mg/L of the model protein, EPO was obtained at day 5.5 post-transfection (130 mg total EPO production) using a fed-batch culture mode. In comparison, perfusion cultures using an enriched SFM II medium resulted in a longer post-transfection production phase (8 days), and 227 mg of EPO was produced in 10.7 L medium, showing that high-density TGE enables the production of several hundreds of milligrams of protein in a 2 L bioreactor. In addition, a protocol for economical plasmid preparation based on anion exchange was also established to satisfy TGE's demand in terms of quality and quantity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of transient transfections at a high cell density of up to 1 x 10(7) cells/mL.