P33: Single Use Centrifuge for Clarification of SUB

The large scale economic collection of proteins is an important problem for the Biotechnology industry. Generally, proteins are produced by an engineered cell culture where a recombinant plasmid containing the gene for that protein is inserted. Since the cell lines used are living organisms, they must be fed with a complex growth medium. Separation of the desired protein from the fermentation broth poses challenges.

Advances in cell culture techniques have greatly increased the cell populations and titers of the target proteins in culture fluid. This increase in upstream efficiency has led to a bottleneck in downstream processing at the cell-harvest stage. Cell harvesting or clarification of the cell culture fluid is an important process. When the product is extracellular, clarification is used to separate the product from the cells and cellular debris. When the finished product is the cells or intercellular proteins/virus cell harvesting is performed. Most Biopharm companies today are seeking ways to integrate this single use technology (clarification/harvest) into the single use process path.

The UniFuge single use centrifuge is fits very well into the single use initiative.

This presentation will compare the UniFuge to several cell harvest/clarification processes.