Researchers are making recombinant-protein drugs cheaper

The mammalian cell lines that are engineered to produce high-value recombinant-protein drugs also produce unwanted proteins that push up the overall cost to manufacture these drugs. These same proteins can also lower drug quality. Researchers have now shown that their genome-editing techniques could eliminate up to 70 percent of the contaminating protein by mass in recombinant-protein drugs produced by the workhorses of mammalian cells -- Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells.