Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells are a preferred host for production of pharmaceutical proteins with a global market of more than 50 billion USD. A new European PhD training network will introduce synthetic and systems biology to the field.
Production of pharmaceutical proteins in mammalian cells is an area with intense industrial interest, unfortunately combined with a shortage of candidates trained from the universities. Furthermore, this is a research area, which historically has had a lot less attention than alternative hosts, such as e.g. E. coli and S. cerevisiae, due to the very recent (2011) publication of the CHO genome.
However, both of these shortcomings will now be strongly advanced due to a recent 4 million EUR Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant coordinated at DTU.
The grant is supporting the eCHO Systems international training network (ITN), a collaborative effort of four academic and fifteen industrial partners, jointly training 15 PhDs. The goal is to in concert to significantly advance the CHO cell platform for production of biopharmaceuticals through the development and application of synthetic and systems biology tools and generate highly desirable candidates trained in cell culture, systems biology, state-of-the-art analytical technologies, and bio-based entrepreneurship.
The European partner institutions are BOKU Vienna, University of Kent, and Dublin City University, with partner companies in Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Ireland, United Kingdom, and Germany. The Network is coordinated in collaboration between DTU Systems Biology and Center for Biosustainability.
More info about eCHO Systems can be found at www.echo-systems.eu
For further questions about the program, write echo-coordinator@biosustain.dtu.dk
The eCHO Systems ITN is funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks program.