ambr® 15 Microbioreactors for CHO Cell Cultivation.

The ambr 15 has become the industry's standard automated microbioreactor system for mammalian cell culture. It has applications throughout the industry, most commonly for cell line screening and media/feed development. On each ambr 15 workstation, conditions in up to 48 × 15 mL bioreactors can be individually controlled while a liquid handler enables automated addition and removal of liquids during the process. Integrated cell counting, metabolite analysis and pH offset correction are also possible thereby reducing the operator interactions that are required. Extensive user and software manuals are supplied by the manufacturer, but in this chapter we describe additional ways of working that we have implemented in routine cell line screening using the ambr 15.

Microbioreactors and scale-down models: growth of CHO cells using the Pall Micro24 MicroReactor system.

Microbioreactors are increasingly used within animal cell biotechnology to grow mammalian cells for cell line screening and to facilitate process development. Many such devices have been reported in the literature, but only a small number are available commercially. Microbioreactors range in complexity from simple plate-based systems to complex automated parallel bioreactors designed to enable the meaningful scale-down of conventional bioprocesses. The Micro24 MicroReactor system (Pall Life Sciences) fits between these extremes providing 24× 7 mL parallel "bioreactors" with individual monitoring and control of temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen. Inoculation, sampling, and feed additions are carried out manually in a Biological Safety Cabinet. In this chapter we describe the use of the Micro24 system to carry out screening or process development experiments with CHO cells.