Hydration And Scale-Up Of AGT Medium In HyPerforma And imPULSE Single-Use Mixers

Cell culture media can have a significant impact on bioproduction output. Generally, cell culture media are available in either a ready-to-use liquid format or a dry format that must be hydrated before use. According to a 2014 study of manufacturing and market trends, dry media hydration was the most common method of media preparation, with dry-format media accounting for 90% of the media purchased by large-scale bioprocessing manufacturers. The demand for dry-format media relates to their lower cost and storage footprint. Preparing dry media quickly and consistently can be critical to ensuring repeatable and robust cell growth and productivity.

Gibco™ Advanced Granulation Technology™ (AGT™) dry-format media are produced using a fluidized bed process, resulting in an easily solubilized granulated product that generates low dust formation. With its distinct benefits, it is beneficial to understand AGT media hydration across different commonly used single-use mixers (S.U.M.s) and specific best-practice recommendations. To address this, testing was conducted to evaluate the hydration of an AGT medium in two mixing studies with a variety of Thermo Scientific™ HyPerforma™ and imPULSE™ S.U.M.s. The first study evaluated how rapidly the AGT medium could be hydrated at various working volumes under predetermined maximum agitation conditions. The second study evaluated the best hydration practices for maintaining the final target pH of the AGT medium. The results of these studies help demonstrate the scalability of hydrating AGT media, outline mixer efficiencies, compare differences in mixing attributes between mixer types, and provide recommendations for best practices for AGT media hydration. This should facilitate optimal planning for media handling operations in the cell culture production process.