Cell culture is an essential technique for researchers using cell-based assays in drug discovery and manufacturing.
Drug candidate selection depends on the consistency and robustness of cell-based assay from the onset, which in turn relies on the quality of cell lines and cell culture. The level of rigor and time involved in doing cell culture for large-scale banking makes it a huge challenge.
Poor quality cell culture may come from inconsistent cell passaging, cell overgrowth, and microorganism contamination. Another common issue resides in the starting cell line being non-clonal. Suppliers at times seek the easy way out by offering pools of cells. Albeit being antibiotic selection resistant, these heterogeneous collections of cells are unstable, with the certainty of target pharmacology drift overtime.
These poor-quality cell banks lead to misleading results that may invalidate months and years of screening data. The intensive labor required by cell culture also takes away precious time that could be spent on research to understand, select and validate the biology of targets and drug lead candidates.