The increasing demand for vaccines and gene therapies pushes the need to scale up manufacturing processes, such as producing virions from cell cultures. Gwendal Gränicher of the bioprocess engineering group at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems in Magdeburg, Germany, keeps looking for better ways to make more virions.
To reach high cell densities from a culture using a perfusion mode, bioprocessors often rely on membrane-based alternating tangential flow filtration (ATF) or an acoustic settler. In a recent study, Gränicher says, “We could observe up to a three-fold increase regarding virus production yields and less large-sized aggregates when continuously harvesting with an acoustic settler, compared to an ATF system, which was not allowing continuous harvesting.
