Understanding and modeling retention of mammalian cells in fluidized bed centrifuges.

Within the last decade, fully disposable centrifuge technologies, fluidized-bed centrifuges (FBC), have been introduced to the biologics industry. The FBC has found a niche in cell therapy where it is used to collect, concentrate, and then wash mammalian cell product while continuously discarding centrate. The goal of this research was to determine optimum FBC conditions for recovery of live cells, and to develop a mathematical model that can assist with process scaleup. Cell losses can occur during bed formation via flow channels within the bed. Experimental results with the kSep400 centrifuge indicate that, for a given volume processed: the bed height (a bed compactness indicator) is affected by RPM and flowrate, and dead cells are selectively removed during operation. To explain these results, two modeling approaches were used: (i) equating the centrifugal and inertial forces on the cells (i.e., a force balance model or FBM) and (ii) a two-phase computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to predict liquid flow patterns and cell retention in the bowl. Both models predicted bed height vs. time reasonably well, though the CFD model proved more accurate. The flow patterns predicted by CFD indicate a Coriolis-driven flow that enhances uniformity of cells in the bed and may lead to cell losses in the outflow over time. The CFD-predicted loss of viable cells and selective removal of the dead cells generally agreed with experimental trends, but did over-predict dead cell loss by up to 3-fold for some of the conditions. © 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Biotechnol. Prog., 32:1520-1530, 2016.

Modeling shear-induced CHO cell damage in a rotary positive displacement pump.

Rotary lobe pumps are commonly used in the biotechnology industry for a variety of purposes. Shear damage to animal cells within the rotary lobe pump can adversely affect the product yield or purity during, for example, cell concentration via cross-flow filtration. In this research, CHO cells grown in 20-L bioreactors were fed to a rotary lobe pump in both single pass and recycle experiments were conducted at different RPMs and "slip" conditions. The results indicate that the slip flow rate more severely impacts the viability of the CHO cells than the pump RPM. A novel mathematical modeling approach is presented that predicts shear rates in all of the positive displacement pump's slip regions, and then predicts cell death vs. operating conditions. This model accounts for the complex flow situation that results from changes to RPM, backpressure and pump geometry (i.e., clearances).