A Multi-Scale Approach To CHO Media Benchmarking

By Claudia Kueppers, Michael Grauf, Thomas Krieg, Tobias Schenk, Dirk Mueller, Christoph Zehe

The selection of optimal growth media and reproducible process conditions are important tasks in the generation of high-yield, high-quality biotherapeutics. The current industry standard is to produce these drugs using mammalian cells such as clonal CHO suspension cell lines. Chemically-defined cell culture media have become the gold standard of modern CHO production processes, facilitating regulatory approval. A well-chosen combination of production clone, process conditions and cell culture media can ensure optimum process performance with regard to product titer and product quality. Unless a platform process is already in place, this often necessitates finding suitable clone/media combinations before embarking on process development. In this context, media formulations reliably supporting robust cell growth and process scalability are critically important to assure reproducible quality and desired characteristics of the final drug product.

We applied a multi-scale approach for media benchmarking, making use of the Ambr15 mini-bioreactor platform for media screening of various clone/media combinations. The results suggest the Sartorius 4Cell® XtraCHO Media System delivers higher performance in terms of cell growth, viability, titer and glycoprofile compared to reference media.