GEN Tutorial: Simplified Small-Scale Harvest of CHO Cells for mAb Analytics

In this study, it was tested whether the body-feed filtration method using diatomaceous earth (DE) as filter aid lead to different monoclonal antibody (mAb) and filtrate characteristics, in regards to five parameters analyzed compared to the well-established centrifugation method. The parameters investigated were reduction of turbidity, recovery of mAbs, mAb molecular weight, charge heterogeneity, glycosylation pattern, and over all work efficiency.

All samples were harvested by both the body-feed filtration method using the Sartoclear^® Dynamics Lab P15 kit and by the traditional centrifugation method, followed by sterile filtration. It was shown that both cell culture harvest methods lead to similar results in all parameters but one. While leading to high recoveries of unaltered mAbs as well as sufficient turbidity reductions of the cell culture fluid (CCF), the DE method reduced the processing time by more than half.