Author(s)

George Koumpouras, Cleo Kontoravdi

Centre for Process Systems Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London, UK.
Nexant Limited, 1 King’s Arms Yard, London, UK.

The Bioprocessing industry delivers high-value protein-based pharmaceutical products produced using microbial or animal cells. Animal cell culture, the only method currently available for the production of proteins with human-like post-translational modifications, is an expensive and labor-intensive process, as animal cells have complex nutrient requirements. Optimization studies have typically been limited to experimental studies, although there has recently been increased interest in combined experimental and computational approaches. In this work, we present the results of a dynamic optimization approach to improving animal cell bioprocesses. We have based this on a model validated over batch and fed-batch conditions and have examined four possible objective functions. Our results indicate that the maximization of the product concentration or the integral of viable cell concentration over time give equivalent results and can improve the product titer up to 70% over non-optimized fed-batch cultures.

Animal Cell Culture; Antibody Production; Dynamic Optimization

G. Koumpouras and C. Kontoravdi, "Dynamic Optimization of Bioprocesses," Applied Mathematics, Vol. 3 No. 10A, 2012, pp. 1487-1495. doi: 10.4236/am.2012.330208.