Disposable materials in bioprocessing and single-use bioreactors have become widely used standards in R&D at small scale as well as cGMP based manufacturing. Both founders of ExcellGene SA (Dr. Maria J. Wurm, CEO, and Dr. Florian M. Wurm, CSO) gave talks about single-use bioreactors at the Disposable Solutions Forum in Berlin, February 19, 2020. The talks highlighted the pros and cons of such disposable materials. Abstracts are shown below.

Maria J. Wurm, Dr. es. Sci.
CEO, ExcellGene

Talk: Disposable Materials for Tox Protein Production: A Case Study for 0.5 kg Manufacture

This short talk covers, in a cursory way, all the steps required, from cell thaw to manufacture and purification of > 500 grams of a high-quality protein batch required for animal studies, among them tox studies. In this case, all steps exclusively used disposable materials. The talk will also highlight the fact that the use of prequalified materials from various providers and the integration of trained teams for use of these materials with no worries about sterility and applicability for the work reduces time lines significantly.

Florian M. Wurm, Dr. rer. nat.
CSO, ExcellGene

Single-Use Bioreactors: Fluid Dynamics, Mixing, Shear Stress, Gas Transfer Rates, etc. – Insights for High-Density Cultures of CHO Cells

Waving, rocking, stirring, shaking…. These are examples of mechanical principles to provide homogeneity and oxygen transfers to CHO cells in single-use bioreactors. Important is also to consider “scalability”, i.e. the capacity of any of the systems to provide data at small scale (mL to L) predicting the performance of the respective system at larger scale. The talk will cover some of the key insights obtained with these different mixing approaches and discusses benefits and drawbacks of them for high-density cultures of CHO cells.