Large-scale microcarrier culture of HEK293T cells and Vero cells in single-use bioreactors

Gene therapy and viral vaccine are becoming attractive therapeutic options for the treatment of different malignant diseases. Viral vector productions are often using static culture vessels and small volume stainless steel bioreactors (SSB). However, the yield of each vessel can be relatively low and multiple vessels often need to be operated simultaneously. This significantly increases labor intensity, production costs, contamination risks, and limits its ability to be scaled up, thus, creating challenges to meet the quantities required once the gene therapy or viral vaccine medicine goes into clinical phases or to market. Single-use bioreactor combining with microcarrier provides a good option for viral vector and vaccine production. The goal of the present studies was to develop the microcarrier bead-to-bead expansion and transfer process for HEK293T cells and Vero cells and scale-up the cultures to 50–200 l single-use bioreactors. Following microcarrier bead-to-bead transfer, the peak cell concentration of HEK293T cells reached 1.5 × 10 6 cells/ml in XDR-50 bioreactor, whereas Vero cells reached 3.1 × 10 6 cells/ml and 3.3 × 10 6 cells/ml in XDR-50 bioreactor and XDR-200 bioreactor, respectively. The average growth rates reached 0.61–0.68/day. The successful microcarrier-based scaleup of these two cell lines in single-use bioreactors demonstrates potential large-scale production capabilities of viral vaccine and vector for current and future vaccines and gene therapy.