Nurturing Cells to Grow

Culture media monitoring with Spedia NMR™

Solid understanding of cell growth patterns and behaviours is central to the development of effective vaccines and antibodies. An innovative analysis service from Eurofins has enhanced researchers’ access to the data they need to optimise research and production conditions when using cell cultures.

The production of biologic therapeutics, such as antibodies or vaccines, requires cell cultures and fermentation bioprocesses. A full understanding of the cell media used allows scientists to first establish those factors that most impact on growth and then to determine the best way to optimise the cell upstream process. This in turn allows for the development of more effective bioprocesses, improved yields and cost efficiency, while reducing variability.

This focus on understanding and controlling the cell growth conditions as early as possible, particularly during the fermentation upstream development phase, led to the launch of Eurofins’ Spedia-NMR™. This nuclear magnetic resonance-based (NMR) analysis service is able to very rapidly monitor a wide selection of feed components, metabolites and toxic compounds in the culture media.

By analysing and comparing media profiles from cell cultures, Spedia-NMR™ delivers information on how cells consume and metabolise the media along the culture process. This, in turn, allows fine-tuning of the composition of the media to improve cell viability, reach the highest yields of biologic product and facilitate rapid process troubleshooting.

Spedia-NMR™ technology offers the biotech research and manufacturing communities significantly enhanced access to detailed quantitative data, across the broadest scope of nutriments and metabolites. This potentially allows for a substantial reduction of the upstream process development timeline by several weeks or months, greatly improving bioreactor capacity access.

The true adaptability of Spedia-NMR™ analysis has led to its application across a range of cell systems and production platforms including bacterial fermentation, stem cells and virus production. Spedia-NMR™ is designed to perform rapid, robust and quantitative analyses of spent media samples in a very cost-efficient manner, using semi-automated data acquisition and processing.

The science behind