Evercyte customer-tailored cell lines

Evercyte’s core mission is to provide relevant human cell lines as model systems for cell based assays as well as cell factories for production of extracellular vesicles.

An important part if this mission is to establish novel, customer tailored, cell lines from tissues or donors specified by customers. These cell lines can be further optimized by stable introduction of specific genetic elements, such as hormone responsive promoter constructs for analysis of biologicals, biosimilars or biobetters, or traceable fluorescent proteins, etc. Alternatively undesired genetic elements can be knocked-out of the optimised cell line, using TALEN or Crispr/Cas9.

Thus, specific and easy read-outs are created for fast, efficient and reproducible cell-based assays using a relevant, primary like cell line.

Need for tailored cell lines

Today, more than 60% of recombinant proteins used for therapeutic applications are produced in mammalian cells. Although mammalian production systems are still costly and time consuming, when compared to bacterial or yeast expression systems, they offer unique advantages such as appropriate protein folding, assembly and posttranslational modification, factors that are major determinants for the biological activity and product quality. Nevertheless, it should also be noted  that most commonly used mammalian expression systems have idiosyncrasies such as abnormal glycosylation patterns and thus may produce protein isoforms that differ from those synthesized in normal cells. Such differences in glycosylation patterns produced by cells from different tissues accentuate the need for selection and establishment of novel host cell lines.

Evercyte has developed human highly differentiated cell lines from various human tissues that show stable growth characteristics and phenotypes and have a high potential for production of complex biopharmaceuticals such as recombinant proteins, vaccines or extracellular vesicles.

Evercyte provides already established cell lines to get proof-of-principle for new production hosts and can establish customer-tailored cell lines as novel production hosts.

What are cell lines?

Cell lines are derived from primary cells growing in the primary tissue culture, shaped through successive subcultures to become cloned cultured cell lines derived from an identified parental cell type. For tailored cultures, it is more helpful to define a cell line as the culture derived from one cell or set of cells of the same type and optimised to ensure that they will proliferate indefinitely given correct conditions.

There is a close correlation here with stem cell culture, where the stem cells are defined as undifferentiated (pluripotent) cells that can divide to produce some offspring cells that continue as stem cells and some cells that are destined to ‘specialize’ and become differentiated cells (e.g., hematopoietic or blood cells), to match those that make up animal tissues and organs. This give them therapeutic potential to replace defective or damaged cells to treat disorders such as Parkinson’s, heart disease, and diabetes. There are two major types of stem cells: embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells, which are also called tissue stem cells.

Non-invasive sourcing of iSPCs

Widely used sources of stem cells include bone marrow, cord blood, and teeth. However Evercyte is distinctive among stem cell companies in preferring to derive induced pluripotent cells (iPSCs) by non-invasive isolation from human urine and non-integratively reprogrammed for therapeutic applications. Similarly, mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) can be isolated from human urine for autologous therapeutic strategies.

Alongside isolation, immortalization and characterization of human somatic cells, Evercyte has also developed a method for the generation of iPSCs from any consenting individual in a non-invasive form. Renal epithelial cells exfoliated into the urine can be reprogrammed into pluripotent stem cells using non-viral techniques. This method has significant advantages in being simple, cost-effective and universal.

Cell line development technologies

For cell based assays, Evercyte can provide relevant and standardized immortalized human cell lines that retain cell type specific functionalities but still divide continuously as well as cell based assays based on its own proprietary cell lines for REACH and other applications.

For production host cell lines, Evercyte can provide human cells as novel host cell lines for production of biopharmaceuticals including recombinant proteins or vaccines, whenever a human glycosylation or other post-translational modification is necessary. Evercyte´s relevant and standardizable cell lines also have a high potential for production of extracellular vesicles. Cell lines are established with full ethical approval and informed consent using xeno-free conditions and non-viral gene transfer methods. Full documentation of any manipulation step is guaranteed. Thus, Evercyte´s cell factories qualify from production of clinical grade material (exosomes, recombinant proteins or vaccines).