Background
Production of biopharmaceuticals for diagnostic and therapeutic applications with suspension cells in bioreactors requires a seed train up to production scale [1]. For the first steps - the transitions between T-flasks, tubes, roller bottles, shake flasks, stirred bioreactors or single-use reactors - the experimental effort to lay-out these steps is high. At the same time it is known that the first cultivation steps have a significant impact on the success or failure in production scale. A software tool has been developed which provides possibilities for simulation, analysis and design of seed trains [2]. Tool structure:
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A kinetic model. In this case a simple unstructured model where kinetic parameters can be obtained from a few experiments only.
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A Nelder-Mead-algorithm to determine model parameters.
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A developed MATLAB software tool able to determine optimal points in time or viable cell concentrations for transfer into the next scale.
The successful application for the cell line (AGE1.HN AAT , ProBioGen AG) has been shown previously [3]. Here the tool was tested for a suspendable CHO cell line.