Production of recombinant h-AT III with mammalian cell cultures using capillary electrophoresis for product monitoring

Abstract

The importance of mammalian cell cultures for biotechnological production processes is steadily increasing, despite the high demands of these organisms on their culture conditions. Efforts towards a more efficient bioprocess generally concentrate on maximizing the culture's life time, the cell number, and the product concentration. Here recombinant BHK 21 c13 cells are used to produce rh-AT III, an anticoagulant of high therapeutic value. The influence of the process mode (batch, repeated batch, continuous perfusion) and the process temperature (30°C vs. 37°C) on the above mentioned parameters is investigated. It is possible to increase the length of the culture from 140 h (batch) to more than 500 h (continuous perfusion culture), while concomitantly increasing the cell density from 0.72 10⁶/ml (batch) to 2.27 10⁶/ml (repeated batch) and 2.87 10⁶/ml (continuous perfusion culture). The accumulation of toxic metabolites, such as lactate, can be curtailed by reducing the bioreactor temperature from 37°C to 30°C during the later part of the exponential growth phase. Fast and reliable product monitoring became essential during process optimization. Capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) in uncoated fused silica capillaries was studied for that purpose and compared to the standard ELISA. Under optimized conditions an AT III quantification could be done within 2 min with CZE. The detection limit was 5 μg/ml. A relative standard deviation of less than 0.9% was calculated. The detection limit could be lowered by one order of magnitude by using a two dimensional system, where an liquid chromatographic (LC) system is coupled to the CZE. Concomitantly the resolution is improved. The two-dimensional analysis required 5 min. Membrane adsorbers (MA) were used as stationary phase in the LC-system, to allow the application of high flow rates (5–10 ml/min). The correlation between the LC-CZE analysis and the standard AT III-ELISA was excellent, with r²: 0.965. Using the assay for at line product monitoring, it is shown, that the process temperature is of no consequence for the productivity whereas the process mode strongly influences this parameter.