Human cells: New platform for recombinant therapeutic protein production

The demand for recombinant therapeutic proteins is significantly increasing. There is a constant need to improve the existing expression systems, and also developing novel approaches to face the therapeutic proteins demands. Human cell lines have emerged as a new and powerful alternative for the production of human therapeutic proteins because this expression system is expected to produce recombinant proteins with post translation modifications more similar to their natural counterpart and reduce the potential immunogenic reactions against nonhuman epitopes. Currently, little information about the cultivation of human cells for the production of biopharmaceuticals is available. These cells have shown efficient production in laboratory scale and represent an important tool for the pharmaceutical industry. This review presents the cell lines available for large-scale recombinant proteins production and evaluates critically the advantages of this expression system in comparison with other expression systems for recombinant therapeutic protein production.

► Development of novel expression systems to face the therapeutics demands is necessary.
► Human cell lines are a powerful alternative for the production of therapeutic proteins.
► Murine cells do not possess the “machinery” required for human-type glycosylation.
► Non-human glycosylation pattern may be highly immunogenic.
► Proteins with murine glycosylation pattern may be rapidly cleared from circulation.