Bioreactor operation biotechnology production

BPD is a contract research facility, which started operations in 1996. From the storage of frozen materials, the customized laboratory services to the consulting in process development and scaling up, BPD has been accumulating useful experiences in the biotechnological scenario. Very flexible set of fermenters are used to satisfy customer needs, through very small and fast adaptation and modifications. Bioreactors productivity varies from 100 mg to 1000 mg scale. 

Commercial manufacturing operations in biotechnology usually employ bioreactors or fermentors for product expression. In this discussion, the term fermentor will refer to bacterial or fungal processes and the term bioreactor to animal cell cultures. While extensive description of the operation... 

The use of biotechnology in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals is of increasing interest Consequently these techniques require attention in the planning of unit processes. Bioprocessing can be considered in terms of small-scale bioreactors, or fermenters, and the translation of such processes into large-scale economically viable production operations. ... 

The rising need for new separation processes for the biotechnology industry and the increasing attention towards development of new industrial eruyme processes demonstrate a potential for the use of liquid membranes (LMs). This technique is particularly appropriate for multiple enzyme / cofactor systems since any number of enzymes as well as other molecules can be coencapsulated. This paper focuses on the application of LMs for enzyme encapsulation. The formulation and properties of LMs are first introduced for those unfamiliar with the technique. Special attention is paid to carrier-facilitated transport of amino acids in LMs, since this is a central feature involved in the operation of many LM encapsulated enzyme bioreactor systems. Current work in this laboratory with a tyrosinase/ ascorbate system for isolation of reactive intermediate oxidation products related to L-DOPA is discussed. A brief review of previous LM enzyme systems and reactor configurations is included for reference. 

This book covers several of the emerging areas of separations in biotechnology and is not intended to be a comprehensive handbook. It includes recent advances and latest developments in techniques and operations used for bioproduct recovery in biotechnology and applied to fermentation systems as well as mathematical analysis and modeling of such operations. The topics have been arranged in three sections beginning with product release from the cell and recovery from the bioreactor. This section is followed by one on broader separation and concentration processes, and the final section is on purification operations. The operations covered in these last two sections can be used at a number of different stages in the downstream process. 

Whitford (48) provides mnch more information that is of interest to chemical engineers involved in the design and operation of fed batch processes for culture of animal cells. Shukla and Thommes (49) discnssed additional aspects of fed batch culture of mammalian cells for large scale production of monoclonal antibodies and related proteins. Further information concerning the use of bioreactors for culture of mammalian cells is contained in the article Mammalian Cell Bioreactors by Zhou and co-workers in the Encyclopedia of Industrial Biotechnology (50). 

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