Upstream Bioprocessing Flashcards
What is traditional bioprocessing and it’s products?
Uses cell culture to produce a product
- antibiotics
- vaccines/viruses
- antibodies
- recombinant therapeutic proteins
What’s stem cell bioprocessing and it’s uses?
Cells are the product
Cells and tissue
- Banking/drug screening programs
- larger scale healthcare applications - stem cell therapies
What’s scale up production?
2000l —> 10000l (big tank)
Scaling production up to one large quantity
What’s scale out production?
2000l —> 10000l (5 x 2000l tanks)
Scaling production up to smaller sections of a bigger quantity
What are the advantages and disadvantages of scale up production?
ADV
- is current standard
- we’ll established
- cost effective
- appropriate for allogenic approaches
DIS ADV
- engineering challenges (mixing gradients temp and ph)
- max loss if fails or contaminated
- equipment scale challenges
What are the ADV and DIS ADV of scale out production?
ADV
- allows for parallel runs
- if failure or contaminated minimal loss
- appropriate for autologous approaches
DIS ADV
- Highly laborious unless automated
- less cost effective
What issues do you run into if you have an inefficient scale up production?
Lower economic performance
- lower yield
- lower capacity
- lower product quality
Operational instability
- mechanical instabilities
- genetic instabilities
- variability
Give some examples of planar culture vessels
- t flask
- multilayer plates
- cell factories
- roller bottles
- compact T selecT (automated cell culture platform)
What are the advantages and disadvantages of planar culture vessels?
ADV
- well understood
- reproducible and standardised
- option to be completely automated
DIS ADV
- static systems —> heterogenous culture environment ( not roller bottles)
- poor surface area to volume ratio
- surface limitation and labour intensive
- unreadable for large cell lot sizes
What is a bioreactor?
A vessel in which a bio based process takes place
What is a reactor?
A vessel in which chemical reactions take place
What’s a fermenter ?
A vessel I’m which cells are grown (e.g, bacteria, yeast)
What are the two bioreactor designs
- Submerged —> mechanical, hydraulic or pneumatic bioreactors
- surface
Pneumatic bioreactor : airlift (bubble column) how does it work?
- Aeration and mixing achieved by gas sparging
- less energy and mechanical storing
- satisfactory heat and mass transfer performance
- lower shear - suitable for plant or animal cell culture
- no moving parts - reduce contamination + easy maintenance
- DO and PH control achieved through varying composition and rate of gas flow through column
Give a limitation of a pneumatic bioreactor : airlift ?
Foaming