GE Healthcare Looks to Boost Biopharmaceutical Production with Synpromics Partnership

In an attempt to battle low production volumes of hard-to-manufacture biopharmaceuticals, GE Healthcare announced on January 4, 2017 that it will partner with Synpromics on the development of synthetic promotors. The goal of the collaboration is to identify promoters that will work most effectively with GE’s existing expression system for optimal transcription.

GE will couple its cell line with a library of bar-coded synthetic promoters from Synpromics to improve platform performance. Promoters drive stronger expression levels of a desired protein, so the partnership could help GE strengthen its platform for future manufacturing projects. Synthetic promoters are said to be capable of driving higher expression levels than do naturally occurring promoters. "One of the attractive features of our technology is that we can design synthetic promoters to be active at the desired expression strength...our technology essentially allows us to find the optimal expression level for the particular protein of interest in the environment and cell type of interest,” David Venables, CEO of Synpromics, wrote via email.

In December 2016, Synpromics announced a similar deal with Sartorius Stedim Cellca. Both the Sartorius and GE projects focus on the discovery of promoters in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells, but Sartorius and GE each have their own proprietary platforms. Synpromics has also created promoters specific to other human cell types, such as liver, skin, lung, cells of the eye, muscle, and cancerous cells.