Perfusion bioreactor systems refer to bioreactors in which cell cultures are maintained in a steady state by continuous feeding fresh media and simultaneously harvesting of spent media in order to maintain high cell viability, density and productivity for significantly longer time than can be achieved through a batch or fed-batch process.
The perfusion process removes and replaces media without compromising the sterility of the cell culture system. Perfusion allows for extremely high cell densities to be achieved and is scalable for a wide variety of volumes. It is a highly efficient way of culturing cells with higher cell viability in a much more controlled manner than batch or fed-batch systems, and by adjusting the flow it can produce much greater cell densities from the same size container.
Another major benefit of perfusion over batch processes is that labile biomolecules and viral particles produced by the host cells inside the bioreactor, such as enveloped viruses like lentivirus that have poor stability in growth media, can be continuously removed from the bioreactor and then safely stored for later use or downstream purification.
Artemis VHU® perfusion technology is particularly suitable for ultra efficient manufacturing of labile viral vectors and viral vaccines from pilot to commercial scale.
Perfusion with Artemis VHU technology can be done with any stand-alone or cell bag-based bioreactor. Only harvesting of the viral vectors and viral vaccines during the production phase is performed using our VHU® perfusion modules.
The heart of the VHU® is a large pore tubular membrane which allows the continuous harvesting of labile viral particles while retaining viable cells inside the bioreactor.
The VHU® has a scale down model, the VHU1 at the 1L scale that can be used to optimise processes without incurring major costs in media while still completely scalable to larger systems. The VHU® is scalable to 10L, 100L and 1000L and the user can simply select the VHU that is appropriate for their culture size.