The Chinese hamster has suddenly become very important to Dublin City University. A research group there has joined with pharmaceutical giant, Wyeth, in a €4 million research collaboration focused on cells cultured from this small, furry mammal.
The project received not one but two launches last month, one at DCU and another at the big Bio 2005 Convention held this year in Philadelphia in the US. The deal is highly significant given that it involves very advanced research in Irish labs on behalf of a huge international biotech player.
"This is actually embedding industrial research in Ireland," says the director of DCU's National Institute for Cellular Biotechnology, Martin Clynes.
"The American research arm is taking Ireland seriously. It really has been a success story by SFI and the HEA," he adds, referring to Science Foundation Ireland, which put up the funding, and the Higher Education Authority's investment in facilities at DCU under the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions.
Wyeth has invested more than a billion euro here to build the largest single biotech-based pharmaceutical production plant in the world. DCU now has links with research collaborators at the Grange Castle, Clondalkin, plant and other Wyeth scientists based at Andover, Massachusetts.
The project focuses on an important individual in the biotech field, the Chinese hamster. Cells taken from the hamster's ovary have become one of the most widely used cell types in biotech plants.
"They are the primary cell used for biotechnology production," says the director of cell and molecular services at Andover, Tim Charlebois.
The cells are first cultured and then engineered by inserting an extra gene, one that produces a valuable pharmaceutical protein useful for medical treatments. The cells are cultured in large tanks and then the target protein is extracted from the cells and purified.
"It is a four-year collaboration for the purpose of doing research to improve the production of mammalian cells for biotechnology," says Charlebois. "The hamster cells are more efficient than yeast or E coli. The proteins they are making are very complex and mammalian cells are better adapted for that purpose."
The problem is, Wyeth has hit production limits using this method, making these important protein-based pharmaceuticals expensive but also forcing them into short supply.
The goal of the project is to find ways either to increase the amount of protein the cell can produce or increase the numbers of cells that can be cultured in a production tank.
"We think we are going really well but I believe we have a long way to go to improve the system," says Charlebois.
The research will study the biochemistry of the hamster cell in minute detail, looking in particular at its gene expression as it grows in the tanks.
"We are hoping to study the biology of the cells under production conditions," he says. "We are trying to understand its fundamental biology."
The work could bring about profound changes to the cell itself, suggests the development director at Grange Castle, Brendan Hughes.
"We want to look at what happens and what goes on under different conditions and then go in and modify the cell's genome," he says. It all comes down to how the cell responds to the production conditions it finds within the tanks.
"We will have eight people working on it here," says Clynes. "We will be looking at gene expression at the RNA and protein level and at a variety of cell types given to us by Wyeth."
Some engineered cells work better than others for unknown reasons, he says. "We are going to try to work out the molecular reasons for this. We may be able to engineer the cells to make them perform better."
Dick Ahlstrom