Abstrait

Single-use bioreactors for microbial cultivation

Nico MG Oosterhuis, Peter Neubauer & Stefan Junne

Single-use bioreactors are commonly used in the biopharmaceutical industry today, however, they are mostly limited to mammalian cell culture processes. For microbial processes, concepts including the CELL-tainer® technology provide comparable oxygen mass transfer such as in stirred tank reactors. Data obtained with 15 and 120 l working volumes indicate excellent performance with Escherichia coli and Corynebacterium glutamicum cultures. Therefore, this type of single-use bioreactor is applicable in biopharmaceutical processes, and also in a seed train for bulk chemicals production such as amino acid production. It is expected that single-use technologies will be applied ever more frequently in microbial-fed batch cultivation processes in combination with improved monitoring and control.