Lactate-Based Model Predictive Control Strategy of Cell Growth for Cell Therapy Applications

Implementing a personalised feeding strategy for each individual batch of a bioprocess could significantly reduce the unnecessary costs of overfeeding the cells. This paper uses lactate measurements during the cell culture process as an indication of cell growth to adapt the feeding strategy accordingly. For this purpose, a model predictive control is used to follow this a priori determined reference trajectory of cumulative lactate. Human progenitor cells from three different donors, which were cultivated in 12-well plates for five days using six different feeding strategies, are used as references. Each experimental set-up is performed in triplicate and for each run an individualised model-based predictive control (MPC) controller is developed. All process models exhibit an accuracy of 99.80% +/- 0.02%, and all simulations to reproduce each experimental run, using the data as a reference trajectory, reached their target with a 98.64% +/- 0.10% accuracy on average. This work represents a promising framework to control the cell growth through adapting the feeding strategy based on lactate measurements.