Best Bioreactors for High Concentration Mab's

Pick which bioreactor performs best and give us your comments.

The CELLine flask is by far the best for research scale antibody production. You almost always see a 20 fold increase in concentration. And contamination is rarely an issue like in the miniperm. Alex Karu did a comprehensive paper at UC-Berkeley comparing the miniperm to the CL1000.

The miniperm couldn't even finish a run without contamination and the concentration was .25mg/ml. The CL1000 produced on average 2 mg/ml and in 40 days produced on average 140 mgs of mab.

The wave is is just a big bag without a semipermeable membrane so you still have to purify a large quantity of sup.
And you are going to use alot of serum.

And the CL1000 is also really good for CHO and 293 for expressing protein.

The CL1000 seems expensive but the Karu article shows that w/ the serum and labor savings, it is inexpensive. With the CL1000 it is so much easier to purify compared with ascites which alot of junk in it - including virus.

Just make sure w/ the CL1000 to harvest from the right port! and to let the cells get to 5 x 10 E8 before harvesting - it should look like a milkshake.

I think wave bioreactor can be a good way since it is scalable

I agree with the last post regarding scalability of wave bioreactor.

Like so many things in science, the best one will depend on your specific needs. I used to provide tech support for the miniPERM, and it really does have some technical advantages over the CeLLine in that the constant motion promotes gas exchange and is advantageous for growth on microcarriers. Marcia obviously had some bad experiences with the MiniPERM, but I dealt with several large academic labs that had problems with the CeLLine and were very happy with the MiniPERM. The biggest problem with the MiniPERM is the price. I am not sure if that is getting better since the distribution changed, but it is still a German product, so don't expect Wal-Mart Pricing.

I have used all 3 and the CELLine is the best for me b/c I do small scale and only need a few mgs at a time and can get it very fast; however, I have heard that for scalability, the wave is good; I don't think the Integra CELLine has bigger flasks than the one liter.

The miniperm I haven't tried - don't know much about.

Hi Marcia,

Do you have the reference for the paper you mentioned by Alex Karu?