Development and characterization of an automated imaging workflow to generate clonally-derived cell lines for therapeutic proteins.

In the development of biopharmaceutical products, the expectation of regulatory agencies is that the recombinant proteins are produced from a cell line derived from a single progenitor cell. A single limiting dilution step followed by direct imaging, as supplemental information, provides direct evidence that a cell line originated from a single progenitor cell. To obtain this evidence, a high-throughput automated imaging system was developed and characterized to consistently ensure that cell lines used for therapeutic protein production are clonally-derived. Fluorescent cell mixing studies determined that the automated imaging workflow and analysis provide ∼95% confidence in accurately and precisely identifying one cell in a well. Manual inspection of the images increases the confidence that the cell line was derived from a single-cell to >99.9%. © 2017 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Biotechnol. Prog., 34:584-592, 2018.