MBT501 Animal Cell Biotechnology

Instructor: TBA

The use of animal cells has been shown to be the most important means of producing recombinant human therapeutic proteins. During the past two years, most of the clinically approved human therapeutic proteins have come from animal cell biotechnology. There are a number of reasons why animal cells have captured the attention of scientists and engineers involved in industrial manufacturing of therapeutic proteins. These include the ability of animal cells to secrete biologically active proteins, properly folded for use as therapeutics. In addition, the ability of animal cells to perform post-translational processing such as glycosylation provides many desirable characteristics that are unique to glycoproteins. These include the increased solubility and longer circulatory half-life that are absent from therapeutic proteins produced in prokaryotic organisms.

This course will cover the various bioprocess engineering concepts needed for the production of glycoproteins from animal cells. The lectures will include material on the following topics:

• Rationale for using animal cells
• Sources for the animal cell lines
• The nutritional requirements for animal cell growth and product formation
• The kinetics of cell growth, cell death, and product formation
• The engineering concepts for the design and operation of animal cell bioreactors for both suspension and anchorage dependent cells
• The critical issue of oxygen transfer to animal cell bioreactors