Berkeley Lights (BLI) announced a program with global pharmaceutical company Daiichi Sankyo focused on using the Beacon platform to accelerate its cell line development workflow. The program includes, screening a pool of recently transfected CHO cells and finding the best clones in 5 days, evaluating and predicting the stability of clones over multiple generations, and establishing monoclonality.
The Beacon platform is capable of screening thousands of clones in less than a week. An initial Daiichi Sankyo study was designed to determine if the Beacon platform can provide a more granular understanding of titer stability by looking at a distribution curve of data points from over a hundred subclones vs the tradition method of looking at only an aggregated value. Several of Daiichi Sankyo's well-characterized clones with different titer stability profiles were subcloned by the BLI system and studied over the course of eight weeks. By looking at a large number of subclones, the Beacon platform provided information about each clonal population, a breadth of information that is not feasible using traditional techniques. Within the first week, the Beacon platform was able to predict the stability of all the well-characterized clones, which aligned with the blinded reference data from Daiichi Sankyo. Automating the process on the Beacon platform increases efficiencies and reduces overall costs as well as provides additional insights into the behavior of clonal populations that is not currently available using traditional techniques.
"We are committed to delivering versatile platforms that can transform our customers' workflows – generating time and cost savings," said Keith Breinlinger, PhD, General Manager Life Sciences, SVP Platform Engineering at Berkeley Lights, Inc. "Daiichi Sankyo is a global leader in the creation and production of pharmaceuticals. We look forward to working with Daiichi Sankyo to support their goal of reaching a new level of scalability and precision that is unattainable with manual and semi-automated methods."