Gene stability in mammalian cells and protein consistency.

The safety of a patient who is the recipient of protein drugs has to be assured. A "wrong" protein is thought to represent a great risk. The philosophy of testing strategies related to gene stability with product safety will be discussed in the light of experimental data available today. Although all mammalian cell lines used in the production of biologicals including recombinant DNA-derived lines have been produced from individual clones (functional monoclonality) they have been found to be heterogenous with regard to the genomic content (number of chromosomes, characteristics of identifiable chromosomes and position and number of integrated recombinant sequences). The verification of the presence of correct gene in a production cell line constitutes a well accepted and useful test, especially if derived by "population sequencing". A batch not related repeated confirmation of this fact cannot lead to any additional assurance for the correctness of all proteins constituting a given product beyond the level provided by cheminal testing. In contrast to this obvious and unavoidable heterogeneity in cellular genomes, the coding regions of genes have not been shown to change. Evidence is available to demonstrate the consistency of protein products originating from recombinant (and hybridoma) cell lines, e.g. more than 500,000 patients have received and tolerated rtPA well.