Industrial Scale Suspension Culture of Living Cells

The submersed cultivation of organisms in sterile containments or fermenters has become the standard manufacturing procedure, and will remain the gold standard for some time to come. This book thus addresses submersed cell culture and fermentation and its importance for the manufacturing industry. It goes beyond expression systems and integrally investigates all those factors relevant for manufacturing using suspension cultures. In so doing, the contributions cover all industrial cultivation methods in a comprehensive and comparative manner, with most of the authors coming from the industry itself. Depending on the maturity of the technology, the chapters address in turn the expression system, basic process design, key factors affecting process economics, plant and bioreactor design, and regulatory aspects.

The holder of a PhD in microbiology from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, Hans-Peter Meyer served as VP Strategic Projects Biotechnology at Lonza until his retirement in early 2014. Following three years of postdoctoral studies in Stockholm, at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and Lehigh University, Bethlehem, USA, in 1982 he joined Prof. Armin Fiechter’s team as group leader at the ETH in Zurich before starting at Lonza in Visp, Switzerland in 1986, where he held a number of positions in R&D, manufacturing, and sales & marketing. He recently joined the faculty of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland, and also remains an expert at the Commission for Technology & Innovation (CTI) of the Swiss Federal Confederation.

Diego R. Schmidhalter is head of R&T within the pharma and biotechnology custom manufacturing division at Lonza Switzerland. He holds a PhD in microbiology from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and carried out two years of postdoctoral studies at Genencor International, California, USA. He has held various management positions at Lonza, including head of microbial manufacturing, head of the Biopharma R&D Services business, and as head of Microbial Manufacturing Science and Technology, as well as being a member of the Biopharmaceuticals business team. Dr. Schmidhalter has over 20 years of experience in the biotechnology industry in biopharmaceuticals and biochemicals process development and manufacturing, technology transfer, scaling-up fermentations right up to the 50,000-liter scale, and within the biopharmaceuticals related regulatory environment.