ABSTRACT
In many countries there are regulations governing pharmaceutical manufacture from suspension cell cultures and a number of products made in this way have been licensed for use. Indeed, mammalian cell cultures are now the preferred source of a number of important proteins for use in human and animal medicine, especially those which are relatively large, complex, or glycosylated. While the large-scale culture of mammalian cells may seem a comparatively recent development, both human and hamster cells had already been grown in 1000-liter culture tanks some 20 years ago. Work on such a scale was at first carried out in only a very few institutions whose special needs made it worthwhile to tackle the initially formidable technological and other problems. One such need was to produce foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) virus vaccines on a commercial scale for veterinary use; another was to make large amounts of human interferon (IFN) for clinical evaluation.
