Human mesenchymal stem cell (hMSC)-based therapies are of increasing interest in the field of regenerative medicine. As economic considerations have shown, allogeneic therapy seems to be the most cost-effective method. Standardized procedures based on instrumented single-use bioreactors have been shown to provide billion of cells with consistent product quality and to be superior to traditional expansions in planar cultivation systems. Furthermore, under consideration of the complex nature and requirements of allogeneic hMSC-therapeutics, a new equipment for downstream processing (DSP) was successfully evaluated. This mini-review summarizes both the current state of the hMSC production process and the challenges which have to be taken into account when efficiently producing hMSCs for the clinical scale. Special emphasis is placed on the upstream processing (USP) and DSP operations which cover expansion, harvesting, detachment, separation, washing and concentration steps, and the regulatory demands.
Disposable bioreactors have increasingly been incorporated into preclinical, clinical, and production-scale biotechnological facilities over the last few years. Driven by market needs, and, in particular, by the developers and manufacturers of drugs, vaccines, and further biologicals, there has been a trend toward the use of disposable seed bioreactors as well as production bioreactors. Numerous studies documenting their advantages in use have contributed to further new developments and have resulted in the availability of a multitude of disposable bioreactor types which differ in power input, design, instrumentation, and scale of the cultivation container. In this review, the term "disposable bioreactor" is defined, the benefits and constraints of disposable bioreactors are discussed, and critical phases and milestones in the development of disposable bioreactors are summarized. An overview of the disposable bioreactors that are currently commercially available is provided, and the domination of wave-mixed, orbitally shaken, and, in particular, stirred disposable bioreactors in animal cell-derived productions at cubic meter scale is reported. The growth of this type of reactor system is attributed to the recent availability of stirred disposable benchtop systems such as the Mobius CellReady 3 L Bioreactor. Analysis of the data from computational fluid dynamic simulation studies and first cultivation runs confirms that this novel bioreactor system is a viable alternative to traditional cell culture bioreactors at benchtop scale.
The production of drugs, cosmetics, and food which are derived from plant cell and tissue cultures has a long tradition. The emerging trend of manufacturing cosmetics and food products in a natural and sustainable manner has brought a new wave in plant cell culture technology over the past 10 years. More than 50 products based on extracts from plant cell cultures have made their way into the cosmetics industry during this time, whereby the majority is produced with plant cell suspension cultures. In addition, the first plant cell culture-based food supplement ingredients, such as Echigena Plus and Teoside 10, are now produced at production scale. In this mini review, we discuss the reasons for and the characteristics as well as the challenges of plant cell culture-based productions for the cosmetics and food industries. It focuses on the current state of the art in this field. In addition, two examples of the latest developments in plant cell culture-based food production are presented, that is, superfood which boosts health and food that can be produced in the lab or at home.
Suspension cultures, in which human mesenchymal stem cells are cultivated on microcarriers in scalable single‐use stirred bioreactor types, have been shown to be a promising alternative to planar flask cultures. However, stirred single‐use bioreactors were originally developed for production processes with robust, permanent cell lines. Human mesenchymal stem cells are adherent primary cells and thus expanding them in such bioreactor systems imposes more stringent requirements on bioreactor systems. For low‐serum conditions (5%) and different types of stirred single‐use bioreactors, a suspension criteria‐based approach for expanding human adipose tissue‐derived mesenchymal stem cells (hASCs) from milliliter to pilot scale was successfully developed. For process scale‐up, experimental and numerical investigations were performed to (i) predict optimum impeller speeds, (ii) determine the main engineering parameters (local shear stress, turbulent dissipation rate, Kolmogorov microscale), and (iii) verify suspension criteria NS1 and NS1u for rapid process transfer from 100 mL to 2 L and 35 L cultures. Using optimized medium‐microcarrier combinations as well as NS1 and NS1u as scale‐up factors, total hASC quantities between 3 × 107 (100 mL scale) and 1 × 1010 (35 L scale) were obtained. The cell quantities obtained are the highest reported to date for scalable single‐use bioreactors under low‐serum conditions.
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