• Microbiology and Biotechnology Letters
• /
• v.32 no.2
• /
• pp.142-148
• /
• 2004

Erythropoietin is a main regulator of human erythropoiesis. Recombinant human erythropoietin (rhEPO) is one of the glycoproteins produced in animal cells, and it has oligo saccharides chains which comprise about 40％ of its molecular mass. Because the content of sialic acid can extend circulatory lifetime, the high degree of sialylation is often a desirable feature of therapeutic glycoproteins. In this study, the sialylation of rhEPO produced by chinese hamster ovary cell culture was maximized by supplementing the culture medium with N-acetylm-annosamine (ManNAc), a direct intracellular precursor for sialic acid synthesis and 2-deoxy-2,3-dehydro-N-acetylneuraminic acid (NeuAc2en), a sialidase inhibitor. Feeding of 20 mM ManNAc/0.5 mM NeuAc2en into culture medium increased the sialic acid content by nearly tenfold compared with unsupplemented medium. This effect was achieved without affecting the cell growth or product yield. Six erythropoietin fractions differing in sialic acid content, ranging from 11∼15％ of EPO, were identified from chinese hamster ovary cell-derived rhEPO by mono Q column chromatography. It was found that, at 20 mM ManNAc/0.5 mM NeuAc2en feeding, productivity of hyper-glycosylated EPO increased up to 50％, compared with the unsupplemented medium.