Engineering characterisation of single-use bioreactor technology for mammalian cell culture applications

Background The commercial success of mammalian cell-derived recombinant proteins has fostered an increase in demand for novel single-use bioreactor (SUB) systems, that facilitate greater productivity, increased flexibility and reduced costs. Whilst maintaining auspicious mixing parameters, these systems exhibit fluid flow regimes unlike those encountered in traditional glass/stainless steel bioreactors. With such disparate mixing environments between SUBs currently on the market, the traditional scale-up procedures applied to stirred tank reactors (STRs) are not adequate. The aim of this work is to conduct a fundamental investigation into the hydrodynamics of single-use bioreactors at laboratory scale to understand its impact upon the growth, metabolic activity and protein productivity of an antibody-producing mammalian cell culture.