Janssen Uses Insilico’s Digital Twins for Cell Culture

Insilico Biotechnology and the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson have agreed to develop Insilico's predictive Digital Twins for the early selection of high-performing cells to increase efficiency and throughput of their cell-line development workflow, the companies announced in a Sept. 27, 2019 press release. The companies will collaborate to develop an automated workflow for predictive clone selection. 

Identifying the best performing cell lines for large-scale production as early as possible is crucial for accelerating development of robust production processes. In a procedure called clone selection, high-performing cell lines are identified and selected for further process optimization. Despite increased standardization efforts in this area, the challenge remains to rapidly identify those clones, noted Insilico in the press release. The company’s digital models of cells allow virtual experimentation to replace time-consuming, wet-lab experiments. Clone-specific digital twins enable the selection of the best producer cells in high-throughput scale-down systems by predicting an individual clone's performance and robustness in large scale and its improvement potential under optimized media and feeding conditions.

"The use of Insilico’s predictive Digital Twins for clone selection is a great example of combining state-of-the-art modelling and experimental expertise. Looking back at several years of successful collaboration, we see a great potential to further shorten our development timelines and thus bring high-quality biopharmaceutical products to patients in the shortest possible time," said Kevin D. Smith, PhD, head of Cell Line Development of Janssen Research & Development, in the press release.

The collaboration will run for three years and will be based at Insilico's site in Stuttgart, Germany and at Janssen's Spring House, PA site in the US.

Source: Insilico Biotechnology