5 Reasons To Move From Shake Flasks To A Bioreactor

By Tony Allman

What are the reasons behind the shift from shake flasks to bioreactors, and what are the potential benefits of this change? The realities of modern research in the biosciences have expanded the need for more information and semi-production capability at small scales.

The arguments in favor of bioreactors include:

• There is a gap in information about key parameters and processes.
• There is a bottleneck in terms of enough material for chemical and biological assays.
• A multi-phase strategy is needed to produce the required material, and this cannot be done in shake flasks.
• Special applications, such as solid-state fermentation, are not appropriate for shake flask cultures.
• The process has to be scaled-up using conventional stirred tank reactors where small-scale cultures can determine key scale-up parameters and generate usable data.

Find out how a bench-scale bioreactor could pave the way for you to maximum culture density and improve process information and scale-up/scale-down development.