S17: CELL-tainer®, a new single-use bioreactor for microbial (pre-)culture

Up to date, large-scale industrial fermentation processes, like production of lysine, are inoculated using a complex seed train. Usually small shake flasks serve as first step in a row of steps which finally ends up in the inoculation of the large (production) fermenters.  This process requires a lot of handling with high risk for infections.

In biopharmaceutical processes, especially for mammalian cell culture, single-use bioreactors are already commonly used as seed fermenters. As the single-use bags are pre-sterilized, no large autoclaves are needed anymore, reducing the risk of infection.

However, these bioreactors are limited in mixing and oxygen mass transfer performance and therefore not suitable for intensive microbial processes.

The recently introduced CELL-tainer^® single-use bioreactor provides, due to its new two-dimensional movement of the bag, a superior mass transfer compared to other single-use bioreactors. This makes the CELL-tainer^® suitable for (pre-) culture of microbial processes, like cultivation of Corynebacterium glutamicum for lysine production.

The growth of Corynebacterium has been compared to (ordinary) shake-flask and traditional stirred fermenters. As pH and DO are controlled, growth conditions of the bacteria are better and more stable in the CELL-tainer^® than in shake-flasks.

It may be concluded that the CELL-tainer^® single-use bioreactor is pre-eminently suitable for microbial (pre-) culture. The inoculation process is simplified and accelerated and the contamination risk is reduced.