Thank you, Asimov for sharing this captivating story about the development of CHO cells. It’s truly remarkable to learn how, even serendipitously, the collaboration between the East and West led to such an invaluable tool that has benefited the entire world. I’ve always been curious about the origin of the name CHO. #biotech #biomanufacturing
We're always interested in the history of the tools we work with. And few tools are more ubiquitous in the biopharma industry than CHO cells, which make ~70 percent of all F.D.A. approved biologics sold on the market. The history of these cells are particularly fascinating, as it involves both a smuggler and the Chinese Civil War. The story goes like this. In 1948, as China's civil war entered its climax, a truck navigated the perilous roads from Peking to Nanking. Inside, a nondescript crate held twenty Chinese hamsters — ten males and ten females — each nestled in its own wood-shaving-lined compartment. The hamsters were a gift from Dr. H.C. Hu, a Chinese physician, to Dr. Robert Briggs Watson, an American doctor working for the Rockefeller Foundation. Watson was retrieving the hamsters for his friend Victor Schwentker, a rodent breeder in upstate New York. Chinese scientists had been studying these hamsters, native to northern China and Mongolia, since at least the 1910s. The hamsters have short gestation periods and natural resistance to human viruses — traits that make them ideal for scientific research. Schwentker wanted to get his hands on some. But with Mao's communist forces advancing, he knew that acquiring these animals would soon become impossible. On December 6, the hamsters arrived at Watson's doorstep in Nanking, a city on the verge of evacuation. The Yangtze River was all that separated the capital from Mao's forces. Despite suffering from dysentery, Watson was preparing to flee. Against the counsel of both his Chinese colleagues and the American Embassy, he loaded the hamsters into a station wagon and drove eleven hours east to Shanghai. The hamsters left China aboard one of the last Pan-Am flights. Watson was later accused of "war crimes" by Mao’s Chinese Germ Warfare Commission and tried in absentia for allegedly conspiring with Chinese nationalists to carry out a biological attack. Dr. Hu faced similar charges and was sent to a detention camp for six months. Upon arrival in San Francisco, the hamsters were shipped to Schwentker in New York. Schwentker was able to domesticate and breed the hamsters, establishing the first colony outside of China by 1950. In 1957, a geneticist named Theodore Puck began seeking robust mammalian cell lines for genetic research. He obtained a single adult female Chinese hamster, extracted an ovary cell, and cultivated it in vitro, thus creating the first CHO cell line. Puck’s cells were both resilient and easy to work with. They grew quickly and could be maintained indefinitely, which was a big improvement for researchers struggling with short-lived mammalian cell cultures. And these are the contours of how CHO became such a dominant cell line for the pharmaceutical industry. We learned about this tale via an excellent 2015 article, called “A Brief History of CHO Cells.” Highly recommend. https://lnkd.in/exjVqS55
