HER2 Support Group Forums - vitamin H and Chinese hamster ovaries

now that I have your attention-- I seem to remember that some of you affectionately refer to your herceptin as vitamin H--vitamin H unfortunately is not an endearing term for herceptin--it refers for biotin! Article is notable for lots of long technical words--but ..when I came across the Chinese hamster ovary I thought your little hamster sneaking in a little overtime!

When I happened to come across this article discussing vitamin H research involving Chinese hamster ovaries, I thought your little hamster might be sneaking in a little overtimeand thought you might be able to weave it into your Chinese hamster yarn allow it to provide a few chuckles:(looks like she might be even more helpful in pharmaceuticals and therefore perhaps in line for the big bucks!)

Published online 2007 September 7. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkm466.
Copyright © 2007 The Author(s)
Vitamin H-regulated transgene expression in mammalian cells
Wilfried Weber,1 William Bacchus,1 Marie Daoud-El Baba,2 and Martin Fussenegger1*
1Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering, ETH Zurich, Wolfgang-Pauli-Strasse 10, HCI F115, CH-8093 Zurich, Switzerland and 2Institut Universitaire de Technologie, IUTA, Département Génie Biologique, F-69622 Villeurbanne Cedex, France
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Phone: +41 44 633 34 48, Fax: +41 44 633 12 34, Email: fussenegger@chem.ethz.ch
Received March 1, 2007; Revised May 24, 2007; Accepted May 28, 2007.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract
Although adjustable transgene expression systems are considered essential for future therapeutic and biopharmaceutical manufacturing applications, the currently available transcription control modalities all require side-effect-prone inducers such as immunosupressants, hormones and antibiotics for fine-tuning. We have designed a novel mammalian transcription-control system, which is reversibly fine-tuned by non-toxic vitamin H (also referred to as biotin). Ligation of vitamin H, by engineered Escherichia coli biotin ligase (BirA), to a synthetic biotinylation signal fused to the tetracycline-dependent transactivator (tTA), enables heterodimerization of tTA to a streptavidin-linked transrepressor domain (KRAB), thereby abolishing tTA-mediated transactivation of specific target promoters. As heterodimerization of tTA to KRAB is ultimately conditional upon the presence of vitamin H, the system is vitamin H responsive. Transgenic Chinese hamster ovary cells, engineered for vitamin H-responsive gene expression, showed high-level, adjustable and reversible production of a human model glycoprotein in bench-scale culture systems, bioreactor-based biopharmaceutical manufacturing scenarios, and after implantation into mice. The vitamin H-responsive expression systems showed unique band pass filter-like regulation features characterized by high-level expression at low (0–2 nM biotin), maximum repression at intermediate (100–1000 nM biotin), and high-level expression at increased (>100 000 nM biotin) biotin concentrations. Sequential ON-to-OFF-to-ON, ON-to-OFF and OFF-to-ON expression profiles with graded expression transitions can all be achieved by simply increasing the level of a single inducer molecule without exchanging the culture medium. These novel expression characteristics mediated by an FDA-licensed inducer may foster advances in therapeutic cell engineering and manufacturing of difficult-to-produce protein therapeutics.
Articles from Nucleic Acids Research are provided here courtesy of
Oxford University Press