How Scale Up Assist Using The BioFlo® 720 Bioreactor Control System Can Help Your Antibody Production Workflow

By Amanda Suttle, John Longsworth, and Ma Sha, Eppendorf, Inc.,

To transfer the productivity from R&D to production, an effective scale-up strategy is required to ensure the reproducibility of both cell culture growth and antibody yields at large working volumes, ideally with little or no additional optimization. The approach using constant power-input is a successful method for matching bioreactor yields at different scales. This study details the use of the new Scale Up Assist feature of the BioFlo 720 Bioreactor Control System to scale CHO batch cultures from 3 L over 10 L stirred-tank, rigid-wall BioBLU® Single-Use Bioreactors (SUBs) to either 50 L or 250 L stirred SUB-bags. Using a built-in constant power software algorithm, the Scale Up Assist specified what agitation and gassing set points to use for different vessel sizes.

We cultivated Chinese Hamster Ovary cells (CHO) using BioBLU Single-Use Bioreactors and Thermo Scientific™ HyPerforma™ 50 L and 250 L SUBs. Our results demonstrated that the parameters provided by the new Scale Up Assist software resulted in similar cell growth and monoclonal antibody (mAb) production yields for all three vessel sizes. Adoption of the controller’s Scale Up Assist function can decrease process development time while also helping to ensure consistent mAb yields across vessel sizes and bioreactor platforms.