BioProcessors' SimCell™ Platform Demonstrates Potential To Increase Amgen's Cell Culture Experiment Capacity
Woburn, MA - An announcement at Biochemical XIV Show disclosed the completion of an important phase of a long-term joint project with Amgen aimed at evaluating BioProcessors' SimCell™ MicroBioreactor technology. This technology has the potential to increase Amgen's mammalian cell culture process development capacity. The evaluation demonstrated the ability of BioProcessors' MicroBioreactor Arrays to scale-down fed batch cell culture processes demonstrating its potential as a high-throughput process development solution capable of enhancing industrial systems. BioProcessors' SimCellÔ MicroBioreactor solutions enable biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to increase cell culture experiment capacity by orders-of-magnitude with greater data quality, faster cycles and lower costs than conventional biopharmaceutical processing methods.
"Existing high-throughput systems emphasize miniaturization at the expense of performance and data generation, in most cases limiting the usefulness of such high-throughput tools to only a screening function," said Dr. Andrey Zarur, CEO and President, BioProcessors. "This paradox is clearly visible in the area of cell culture where 96 well plates and shake flasks are used as high-throughput screens for cell line selection, media and process optimization. In all but the simplest of processes these systems are at best only a crude approximation of a working bioreactor and hence provide little reliably scalable cell culture process information. Poor scalability and, in the case of shake flasks, insufficient experimental power to provide complete full factorial process development DOEs limits researchers ‘real-time' ability to identify robust processes capable of operating at their global optima," Dr. Zarur added. BioProcessors' SimCell MicroBioreactors address this process development "data gap" by integrating microfluidics with remote monitoring and control, enabling high-throughput process development through the miniaturization of bioreactors that accurately simulate full scale manufacturing processes.
BioProcessors has demonstrated the performance of the SimCell system through a series of collaborative experimental protocols on Amgen cell lines. Throughout this series of evaluation experiments, over 1,500 MicroBioreactors successfully ran for periods up to 14 days in both batch and fed batch modes. Data generated for the conditions tested to date indicate good correlation to stirred tank reactors and hence the scalability of the SimCell system. BioProcessors and Amgen intend to continue evaluation of SimCell applications.
SOURCE: BioProcessors