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Cell Culture Media Optimization | The mainstay for major bio pharmaceutical applications such as, production of biologic therapies including monoclonal antibodies, vaccines, cancer therapeutics, cell based therapies, tissue engineering, is based on cell culture process optimization. Although for some cell types the cell culture cocktails are well established and backed with decades of research for some others this laborious yet critical process needs extensive optimization and key resources. A host of factors come into play, such as the nutrients, buffer conditions, culture vessels, need for a culture matrix, culture scale, cell line, cell densities, time period of culture, metabolic factors that are released during culture including bye-products. | Bacterial cell lines such as E.coli are model work-horses with shortest half life and used extensively in biotechnology industry for decades. Enormous research is ongoing on the expression systems and culture media conditions for optimizing protein production and recovery. Animal cell lines on the other hand consisting of delicate cell membrane and variable doubling times require separate set of nutrients and specialized media for culture. |
Typically cell culture medium is composed of a glucose, inorganic salts, complement of amino acids, vitamins, serum, and attachment factors or a matrix. Considering the limitations in stability of certain amino acids in media such as glutamine, the source of nitrogen for NAD, NADPH and nucleotides and serves as a secondary energy source for metabolism, more specialized and stable substitutes such as glutamax are employed. In addition to nutrients, the medium also helps maintain pH and osmolality variations of buffer conditions. Although fetal bovine serum is widely used as a source of growth factors, serum free media versions are also available to date to enable culture of specific cell types. Serum free media therefore comprises the critical protein, peptide and lipid components. Albumin, transferrin and fribronectin being the basic protein source, media may be substituted with cholesterol rich lipids as fatty acid source. | | Determination of the right media conditions is a crucial step in achieving successful culture. Media optimization kits therefore become a prerequisite in optimizing the culture requirements, the right buffer conditions nutrients and supplements for any complex media. Once the right components are determined, several different forms of media formulations are available to date to choose from, such as powdered and liquid media at various sizes to meet the wide variety of needs. While nutrient levels in media are extremely critical to meet the requirements of specific recombinant protein production in cell culture, cell densities and metabolites released have to be considered while optimizing culture conditions. For industrial production of protein products and cellular therapies, Animal product free formulations of cell culture media are now becoming an industry standard
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Please refer to our AssayCell catalog for a comprehensive listing and detailed information on cell culture media products | | | | | | | |
