panflu Stats

[Mixin]

this is a press release but the concept is worth consideration

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[snips]
Cologne, Germany, September 28, 2010 / b3c newswire / CEVEC Pharmaceuticals, the developer of an extremely potent protein expression system based on human CAP cells, announced today that CAP cells produce high virus titers upon infection with influenza strains. The virus titers are as good as or even higher than with MDCK and Vero cells, host cells currently used for influenza vaccine production.

"The infected CAP cells grow rapidly in serum-free and commercially available media. With an optimized medium even higher virus titers can be expected,'' added Wolfgang Kintzel, CEVEC's Chief Commercial Officer and Managing Director.
http://www.cevec-pharmaceuticals.com/news

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From a blog post

The CAP cell line is a stable, immortal cell line derived from human amniocytes. An amniocyte is a fetal cell suspended in the amniotic fluid, the same cells used for prenatal diagnosis of genetic disorders like Down's Syndrome, Zellweger Syndrome or Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy.

A huge advantage to using CAP cells in genetic engineering is that protein products are glycosylated following human patterns of post-translational modification.

http://biotech.about.com/b/2010/11/02/amniocytes-the-future-of-vaccines.htm
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