After manufacturing cells in a bioreactor, bioprocessors need methods to capture that product. Using membranes and other conventional methods of separating the cells can lead to clogging, cost too much or just fail to be reliable. At the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in Australia, biomedical engineer Majid Ebrahimi Warkiani, PhD, and his colleagues connected two microfluidic systems to capture a high concentration of cells from a perfusion bioreactor.
Typically, a cell separator based on inertial microfluidics doesn’t clog, but it’s not efficient when the cell concentration gets high. By using two membrane-less microfiltration techniques, Warkiani and his team’s device still doesn’t clog but stays efficient at high cell densities.
