LOWERING COST OF GOODS & SCALING-UP FOR BIOMANUFACTURING
The market demand for animal cell culture remains strong. This is driven by the high dosage requirements of biotherapeutic drugs such as antibodies for immunotherapies and viral vector for gene therapies. The worldwide quest for cruelty-free, low-cost and environmentally friendly cultivated meats recently adds a new perspective to animal cell culture. These applications have created a need for efficient, high-titer processes which dramatically reduce the cost of goods during manufacturing.
The Animal Cell Bioprocessing Group develops efficient, high-titer and scalable animal cell cultivation processes to enable scale-up manufacturing for these applications to reduce cost of goods. Using our capabilities in upstream animal cell culture processing with bioreactors of different make, we develop scalable batch, fed-batch, continuous and perfusion bioreactor cell culture processes from 10 mL to 50 L. To further improve protein productivity and product yields, chemically defined protein-free media and optimized feeding strategies for recombinant therapeutic protein production using Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) and other mammalian cell lines have also been established. Using new technologies such as Metabolomics, intra- and extra-cellular metabolites will be tracked in high density cultures, which can guide media design for improved culture performance. These capabilities enable research translations by facilitating scalable manufacturing and commercialization of products made using animal cell culture, such as recombinant proteins, viral vectors, vaccines and cultivated meats.
The group is actively researching in continuous bioreactor processes for antibody production, process development for AAV and heparan sulfate production, development of HEK293 bioproduction system, and production of cultivated meats.