Background & Overview

The Company’s easy to use bioreactor platform for cell culture is at the centre of a range of products that can be used to simplify fermentation and cell culture bioprocesses in biopharmaceutical research, scale up, production and manufacturing.

The single-use, disposable elements of the Cellexus product range includes the CellexusBag cell culture bioreactor bags which has been designed in a unique fashion to enable rapid optimisation of cell culture processes under clean and sterile conditions. These proprietary cell culture bags offer rapid set up times and are designed with sparge tube facility to ensure sample aeration and growth at high cell densities. They are constructed for use in the Cellexus CellMaker range of cell culture control instrumentation, which include a Controller unit to enable important user defined parameters to be specified as well as an Enclosure unit in which the CellexusBag is held. These use-once, self contained cell culture bioreactor bags are made from a new, co-extruded, multiple polymer material. They are manufactured from pharmaceutical grade plastics welded using a simple, strong manufacturing processes under class 10,000 clean room conditions and to the ISO standards required by the biopharmaceutical industry (Product File is available for audit on request).

The Cellexus single-use, disposable technologies employ a novel airlift technology, available only from Cellexus, which is simple, scalable and inexpensive to use, the main principles behind which are:

1. A patented air dispersion system on the CellMaker Enclosure aerates the cell culture from the base of the CellexusBag. The low density mixture of aqueous solution and gas forms a riser current and is heated via a heating pad located on the inner surface of the CellMaker Enclosure.
2. Due to the unique shape of the CellexusBag, the upper surface acts as a deflector and pushes the riser current to the front of the CellexusBag upper chamber.
3. This transverse movement allows gas exchange with the headspace, which can be independently aerated with gas mixtures. The relatively large surface area of the CellexusBag, with respect to its volume, allows gentle gas exchange for cell cultures not requiring vigorous aeration.
4. The low density riser current is displaced by the higher density down coming current. A temperature probe is located on the CellMaker Enclosure on the opposite surface from the heater mat. This measures the temperature of the solution, data which can be used to automatically regulate cell culture temperature from 15 to 40°C to within ±0.1°C.
5. The unique ability to pressurise the in the CellexusBag to as low as 0.75 psi (50mBar) reduces formation of potentially damaging foam. As an example, when serum free CHO cell media is used, elimination of 95% of foaming occurs within 10-20 minutes of pressure application.