Bio-pharmaceuticals R&Ds are working with mammalian cell expression systems for developing mAbs and other therapeutic proteins. Scientists today are using increasingly smaller culture volumes grown in 10ml to 15ml micro bioreactor formats or even smaller volumes in 24 to 48 plate systems for clone and media optimization, cell line selection, small scale perfusion mimic and early process optimization. In these applications multiple cell harvests need to be clarified to remove cells and debris before the critical metabolite analysis/ chromatography steps. Conventional methods for clarification of such small volumes (few mL) are centrifugation followed by 0.2µm membrane filtration.
However centrifugation is a time consuming, cumbersome process and may also result in shearing of cells resulting in increased cell debris, cell organelles and intracellular proteins in the supernatant. The conventional syringe filter, although used for final filtration of the supernatant does not offer an efficient solution in terms of throughputs.’
A new revolutionary device that offers one step sterile harvesting of upto 10ml mammalian cell cultures is now available. MDI One step MicroHarvester delivers a sterile filtrate directly from the harvest within a couple of minutes. It incorporates specially designed progressively finer multilayered micro glass fiber filter media for retention of mammalian cells, organelles and other cell debris and to protect the final low protein binding 0.2µm sterilizing grade PES membrane layer.
MDI MicroHarvester is a fast and easy, hand held device for one step sterile filtration of up to 10 mL of mammalian cell harvests. It provides a sterile filtrate directly from medium to high density (upto 30 million cells per ml) mammalian cell harvests within a couple of minutes. The filtrate is ready to use for downstream metabolite and protein analysis.