Special Focus: an ‘omics approach to Chinese hamster ovary based pharmaceutical bioprocessing

2014 Chinese hamster ovary cell ‘omics 2.0 Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells are the most widely used mammalian cell for the production of recombinant therapeutic proteins. For over a decade, industrial and academic research groups have used ‘omics technologies to profile CHO cells to understand the biological processes that make them effective cellular factories. The goal of these efforts is to realize more efficient and predictable biopharmaceutical production. The release of the CHO-K1 cell line genome in 2011 signaled the beginning of a revolution for the CHO cell biology community [1]. Since then, five additional CHO cell line genomes and two Cricetulus griseus genomes have been published [2,3]. The availability of these data have accelerated research dramatically allowing us to develop accurate expression profiling platforms, apply modern gene editing technologies and for the first time carry out genomescale analyses. The CHO cell ‘omics 2.0 era has begun. This timely special focus issue of Pharma­ c eutical Bioprocessing presents a series of reviews, editorials and perspectives from academic and industrial scientists on recent developments and emerging trends in the CHO cell biology area.