Culture of Anchorage-Dependent Cells

Abstract

There is a genuine need in the biotechnology industry for the capability of growing, cheaply and efficiently, normal, untransformed, anchorage-dependent animal cells on a large scale. This need exists for the unique products that these cells may be capable of synthesizing, and in the case of esoteric cell types, such as chondrocytes, hepatocytes, etc., for the very cells themselves, as well as for the advantages inherent in the use of normal cells in biotechnology manufacturing. Unlike transformed cells, normal cells do not secrete large amounts of proteases nor produce truncated carbohydrate side chains; they do not harbor oncogenic viruses or activated oncogenes, which pose problems of regulatory and safety issues, and, at least theoretically, they should be able to continue to produce large amounts of protein while in the quiescent, noncycling state—the ideal condition for most efficient synthetic protein production. Unfortunately, unlike transformed cells, most normal animal cells are unable to grow in suspension, but require attachment to a solid substratum or extracellular matrix (anchorage-dependence). This makes their large-scale cultivation extremely costly and technically difficult.