Production and exploitation of mammalian cells
AOA Miller


Mission : mammalian cells to improve the human health.
CIL BIOTECH s.a. has developed and reduced to practice a range of innovative and enabling technologies related to the culture of isolated cells in suspension and of anchorage-dependent cells.

These technologies include :
High cell density culture of cells in suspension with concomittant downstream processing. This technique, easy to implement, has been successfully applied for the isolation and the purification of monoclonal antibody (92% recovery – 85% purity) secreted by an hybridoma cell line cultivated during 4 weeks at 22E6 cells/ml.
Serial cultivation of anchorage-dependent cells. Successive enzymatic detachment of anchorage-dependent mammalian cells from large volume cultures under sterile conditions as practiced today by the pharmaceutical industry is expensive and very time consuming. Serial cultivation constitutes an elegant alternative : anchorage-dependent cells detached using a chelator and controlled mechanical shear (95% viability) are used to inoculate freshly added microsupport and the whole growth process is then resumed. All operations can be automated and take place in the same vessel.

New developments relate to :
The development of the perfused cytostat technology. Growing isolated cells in agitated suspension to a preset cell concentration and maintaining them at that concentration, simultaneously perfusing the bioreactor to provide ample amounts of nutrilites suppresses all inconsistencies related to batch, fed-batch and perfused modes of cultivation, providing the user with constant, high quality exponentially growing cells.