Single-use (SU) components are increasingly used for the production of biologics, and many production steps have successfully shifted from stainless steel to SU components. In the cell harvest, however, current technologies struggle to keep up with the increasing demand for larger batch volumes and higher cell densities. Depth filters, for instance, require too many modules and have a huge footprint, in addition to being susceptible to turbidity breakthrough.

The CONTIBAC^® SU filtration technology of DrM excels where other technologies crumble, due to introducing two novel concepts in the field:

1.) Cake (dead-end) filtration: The filter medium does not perform the filtration, but it acts as a support for the filter cake consisting of cells and filter aid. As a result, the filtration is much faster, and the filter medium can be regenerated by back-flushing from the opposite side.

2.) Cyclic operation: Since the filter medium can be regenerated, the filter can be operated in a cyclic fashion as will be explained in the webinar.

In the webinar it is demonstrated that the aforementioned filtration concepts allow for achieving unprecedented filtration rates without sacrificing filtrate quality. It will be discussed what percentage of impurities such as host cell proteins or DNA can be removed during the filtration, and how the flow rates and impurity removal can be altered using pH adjustments.