UCB Data Shows Comparable Performance of Clones Cultured in ambr and 100L Bioreactors

TAP Biosystems has announced that new data presented at a Cell Line Development and Engineering meeting by scientists at major European biopharmaceutical firm, UCB has shown that the micro-scale bioreactor system (ambr™) is equivalent in performance to a 100L bioreactor.

This indicates that ambr is a realistic scale-down model and can be used to improve cell line selection processes.

Scientists at UCB used the ambr system to culture five different protein expressing CHO cell lines. One of the five cell lines was also cultured under identical process conditions in 100L Applikon stirred tank bioreactors.

Their results showed that cultures grown in ambr were comparable to those grown in a 100L bioreactor in terms of growth, productivity and protein product quality.

The UCB scientists concluded that using ambr it was possible to test 24 clones in parallel, with results representative of the larger scale. This enables more cell lines to be evaluated in a shorter time, thus increasing the likelihood of selecting higher yielding clones.

Dr Barney Zoro, ambr Product Manager at TAP Biosystems concluded: “The data from UCB is very exciting because it shows that the 15mL ambr micro bioreactor is equivalent in performance to 100L bioreactors, allowing UCB’s scientists to reduce time lines for the cell line selection workflow, with confidence in scalability of the results. So it is now possible and time efficient, to evaluate many more lines for clone selection and this study confirms that using ambr as a scale-down model will provide scientists with a significant benefit when developing antibody and other protein based therapeutics.”