Microbioreactors and scale-down models: growth of CHO cells using the Pall Micro24 MicroReactor system.

Microbioreactors are increasingly used within animal cell biotechnology to grow mammalian cells for cell line screening and to facilitate process development. Many such devices have been reported in the literature, but only a small number are available commercially. Microbioreactors range in complexity from simple plate-based systems to complex automated parallel bioreactors designed to enable the meaningful scale-down of conventional bioprocesses. The Micro24 MicroReactor system (Pall Life Sciences) fits between these extremes providing 24× 7 mL parallel "bioreactors" with individual monitoring and control of temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen. Inoculation, sampling, and feed additions are carried out manually in a Biological Safety Cabinet. In this chapter we describe the use of the Micro24 system to carry out screening or process development experiments with CHO cells.