Disposable Bioreactors for Inoculum Production and Protein Expression. In: Pörtner R, editor. Animal Cell Biotechnology. Totowa: Humana Press; 2007. pp. 321-35. [DOI: 10.1007/978-1-59745-399-8_15]

Disposable bioreactors: the current state-of-the-art and recommended applications in biotechnology

Disposable bioreactors have increasingly been incorporated into preclinical, clinical, and production-scale biotechnological facilities over the last few years. Driven by market needs, and, in particular, by the developers and manufacturers of drugs, vaccines, and further biologicals, there has been a trend toward the use of disposable seed bioreactors as well as production bioreactors. Numerous studies documenting their advantages in use have contributed to further new developments and have resulted in the availability of a multitude of disposable bioreactor types which differ in power input, design, instrumentation, and scale of the cultivation container. In this review, the term "disposable bioreactor" is defined, the benefits and constraints of disposable bioreactors are discussed, and critical phases and milestones in the development of disposable bioreactors are summarized. An overview of the disposable bioreactors that are currently commercially available is provided, and the domination of wave-mixed, orbitally shaken, and, in particular, stirred disposable bioreactors in animal cell-derived productions at cubic meter scale is reported. The growth of this type of reactor system is attributed to the recent availability of stirred disposable benchtop systems such as the Mobius CellReady 3 L Bioreactor. Analysis of the data from computational fluid dynamic simulation studies and first cultivation runs confirms that this novel bioreactor system is a viable alternative to traditional cell culture bioreactors at benchtop scale.

Bag bioreactor based on wave-induced motion: characteristics and applications

Today wave-mixed bag bioreactors are common devices in modern biotechnological processes where simple, safe and flexible production has top priority. Numerous studies that have been published on ex vivo generation of cells, viruses and therapeutic agents during the last 10 years have confirmed their suitability and even superiority to stirred bioreactors made from glass or stainless steel for animal as well as plant cell cultivations. In these studies the wave-mixed bag bioreactors enabled middle to high cell density and adequate productivity in laboratory and pilot scale. This mainly results from low-shear conditions and highly efficient oxygen transfer for cell cultures, as demonstrated for the widely used BioWave((R)).Starting with an overview of wave-mixed bag bioreactors and their common operation strategies, this chapter delineates engineering aspects of BioWave((R)), which like Wave Reactor and BIOSTAT((R))CultiBag RM originates from the prototype of a wave-mixed bag bioreactor introduced in 1998. Subsequently, the second part of the chapter focuses on reported BioWave((R)) applications. Conditions and results from cultivations with animal cells, plant cells, microbial cells and nematodes are presented and discussed.