Evaluation of a Single-Use Benchtop Process Development System to Optimize Cell Growth and Scale-Up of Veterinary Vaccine Production

by Lídia Garcia, Mercedes Mouriño, Alicia Urniza, and Sandra Juanola
Volume 18, Open Access (February 2019)

In the past 20 years, mammalian cell lines have been utilized to produce many viral veterinary vaccines. Cell lines such as baby hamster kidney (BHK)-21, Vero, and Madin Darby canine kidney (MDCK) are widely used because they help facilitate shorter manufacturing lead times and tighter process controls. As compared to other biotech products, viral vaccine manufacturing processes present some specific constraints linked to the cell substrates used. With the global veterinary vaccine market value predicted to be almost $7 billion per year by 2021[2], to remain competitively priced as well as profitable, bioprocess scientists are under pressure to develop methods for faster and more cost-efficient cell culture production. This has led to a shift from the use of expensive, two-dimensional T-flask and roller bottles to single-use, stirred tank bioreactors with microcarriers, or the adaptation of attachment-dependent cell lines such as BHK-21 for suspension culture. This requires time-consuming optimization and scale-up development experiments, which are real drawbacks. However, utilizing automated, single-use mini bioreactors as a scale-down model can enable more efficient use of time and optimization of media, feed, and culture conditions to de-risk upstream process development. In this article, single-use, mini bioreactors are evaluated to determine if they are geometrically comparable to benchtop bioreactors (both glass and single-use vessels) and pilot-scale, single-use bioreactors for effectively modelling mammalian cell culture at 2 L and 50 L scale…

Citation:
Garcia L, Mouriño M, Urniza A, Juanola S. Evaluation of a single-use benchtop process development system to optimize cell growth and scale-up of veterinary vaccine production. BioProcess J, 2019; 18. https://doi.org/10.12665/J18OA.Garcia

Posted online February 11, 2019.