Monday, November 16, 2015 Daily Archives

Quantitative Risk Assessment of Bioaccumulation Attributable to Extractables and Leachables in Cellular Immunotherapy Biomanufacturing

Precious patient samples, contamination concerns, and limited product purification options have compelled manufacturers of cellular immunotherapies (iTx) such as chimeric antigen receptor T cells (CAR-T) and T-cell receptor (TCR) technologies toward the disposables industry. Such companies are implementing single-use technologies (SUTs) almost exclusively (1). But despite the dominance of disposable bioprocess platforms and their extraordinary growth in the iTx marketplace, researchers have made limited efforts to understand the perennial and critical bioprocessing risks of leachables and extractables. Here we outline…

Experiences with a Benchtop-Scale Glass Bioreactor: Engineering Data and Cultivation Results

Animal cell lines (the dominant expression systems in biopharmaceutical production processes) are mostly cultivated in stirred bioreactors (1). Although such bioreactors are widely accepted and applicable over a wide range of scales, engineering data for these systems are still lacking. Nevertheless, studies have shown that the correct choice of key parameters (e.g., power input, tip speed, mixing time, and oxygen mass transfer) can influence the growth of animal cell cultures (2). Therefore, detailed characterization is essential. It enables reliable scaling…

Ask the Expert: Taking Medium and Feed Development Beyond Maximizing Protein Titer to Optimizing Glycan Distribution and Simplifying Process Scale-Up

with Serena Fries Smith (Thermo Fisher Scientific) In the early 2000s, maximizing expression titers was the industry’s biggest challenge. Over the past 10–15 years, significant advances in media and feeds have enabled standard fed-batch processes to achieve 3 g/L, some as high as 7 g/L. The productivity increase is enabling scientists to move beyond titer and focus resources on addressing other scientific challenges (e.g., product quality modulation and process scale-up). One way to address those challenges is by leveraging feed…