Air-Wheel™ Bioreactor Offers Seamless Transition From Stirred-Tanks In Fed-Batch CHO Process

Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells have been used extensively for large scale recombinant protein production over the last 20 years. As animal cells, CHO cells offer advantages over other expression systems in that they  secrete desired products with accurate glycosylation patterns that have undergone proper protein folding. The added benefits that CHO cells offer are that they are well-characterized with a solid track record for meeting the strict regulatory requirements for biopharmaceuticals, in addition to their high productivity (cell growth and protein expression levels) and their robustness to culturing in suspension in conventional stirred-tank bioreactor systems.

The novel, low shear single-use bioreactor system from PBS Biotech® has the potential to offer unmatched performance in shear-sensitive applications involving  microcarriers and viral production, but we show here that processes developed and optimized in a traditional stainless steel stirred-tank system can be easily transferred over to the PBS platform with at least equivalent results and the potential for better performance.

Experimental Procedure
In this study, a CHO-S cell line expressing an Fc-fusion protein was cultured in fed-batch mode over a span of 13 days at typical operating conditions in the PBS bioreactor at 250L working volume, in parallel to a stainless steel stirred-tank bioreactor at 220L working volume. Concentrated glucose and glutamine solutions were fed to the bioreactors as needed in predetermined amounts. The desired protein was purified and analyzed upon harvest.