MAMMALIAN CELL CULTURE CLARIFICATION: A CASE STUDY USING CHIMERIC ANTI-CEA MONOCLONAL ANTIBODIES

The extracellular expression of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) in mammalian cell culture provides both opportunities and restrictions for the design of robust harvest and clarification operations. With advances in cell culture media and cell lines, it is now possible to achieve high titers of over 5 g/l for mAbs. However, Mammalian cells are sensitive to breakage due to shear stress that can result in release of proteases and other host cell proteins (HCPs) which eventually affects product stability and purity. There is larger number of mAbs undergoing clinical development and it has placed significant importance on platform technologies of process development. Generally, Centrifugation and microfiltration are the primary harvest techniques used in the industry and depth filtration is also used as a step operation on clarification. This study compares the unit operations; centrifugation, microfiltration and depth filtration for maximum recovery of monoclonal antibodies. The results have shown that the depth filtration as more suitable operation for mammalian cell culture clarification since it gives 96% recovery of mAbs in comparison to centrifugation and microfiltration.