Continuous processing, for decades an essential characteristic of advanced large-scale manufacturing, has been adopted slowly for mammalian cell-based processes, and even more haltingly for microbial fermentations. In a recent paper in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, lead author Christoph Herwig, PhD, at the Vienna Institute of Technology, described the reasons for the snail-paced uptake:
* Controlling metabolic load for sustained recombinant production, for example, through assessment of cellular population stability and the analysis of phenotypic and genotypic instabilities