Monday, August 13, 2012
Columbia Hall, Terrace Level (Washington Hilton)
Saccharomyces cerevisiae is known for its rapid growth, high-density fermentation in simplified medium, and safety for laboratory use. This yeast is a widely-used host organism for the production of therapeutic proteins and is often cultivated in glucose based fed-batch processes. However, running S. cerevisiae fed-batch cultures on the traditional lab-scale fermentor is costly and time consuming. By using the bioPOD low-scale multi-fermenters technology, we optimized the production of recombinant erythropoietin (rEPO) in a S. cerevisiae strain altered for N-glycosylation. We established a reliable process that increased the concentration of secreted rEPO by 100 times and successfully scaled the fermentation up to 2 liter-fermenters. Data in this work demonstrate that BioPOD is a useful tool for the optimization of protein production in S. cerevisiae.