Monday, November 7, 2011
Capri Ballroom (Marriott Marco Island)
Single-use bioreactors have many advantages for R&D fermentation process development; rapid system implementation, increased flexibility in size and turn-around, reduced infrastructure, reduced cross-contamination risk and minimal maintenance requirement are the main drivers. However, most applications are restricted to cell culture, little if no equipments are available for high density bacterial fermentation due to oxygen and heat transfer limitations.
Here we describe the evaluation of different single-use bioreactors :
- for anaerobic strain : process was first evaluated at 3L scale in a Cell-ready bioreactor, showing same results as classical glass bioreactor. Then scale-up was successfully implemented at 200L scale in a STR 200 single-use bioreactor.
- For aerobic strain : The Cell-tainer bioreactor has been evaluated with our standard recombinant E.coli process achieving similar biomass and protein production as in stainless steel reactor.
Single-use bioreactors are well adapted for R&D. The main issues (oxygen and heat transfer) linked to aerobic strains such as E.coli were even overcome for the first time in a single-use equipment.