Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year (2017-2018 to 2018-2019).

Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells are used extensively in the pharmaceutical industry to produce recombinantx000D
proteins to treat an array of diseases. The productivity and the therapeutic effectiveness of these proteins arex000D
highly influenced by the chemical composition of the chemical medium and the bioreactor operating conditionsx000D
that are used to grow the cells.x000D
Optimizing the media composition is very challenging due to its complex nature involving tens of differentx000D
components such as aminoacids and non-aminoacid species (salts, vitamins, metals etc.).x000D
Our industrial collaborator (Sigma-Aldrich), a main manufacturer of cell culture media, is currentlyx000D
experimenting with an advanced system of 48 micro-reactors (Sartorius-AMBR 15, 15 ml volume each), that itx000D
is not available in our lab, to develop new cell lines and growth media. Although industrial antibodyx000D
manufacturing involves either fed-batch or perfusion operations, the AMBR micro-bioreactor system isx000D
comparatively much easier, quicker and cheaper to run for the purpose of media development.x000D
The work of my group in modeling of mammalian cells (Nikdel and Budman, 2016) can be directly applied tox000D
two aspects that are of interest for Sigma for the purpose of media development with the AMBR system:x000D
i- To expand the validity of the model developed at Waterloo under the first Engage project for describing bothx000D
AMBR and perfusion operations using different media formulations andx000D
ii- To develop a novel hybrid modeling approach, where the metabolic model describing the dynamics ofx000D
aminoacids is combined with an empirical model to describe non-aminoacid components (salts, vitamins,x000D
metals, etc.). This model will be later used for media and process optimization.