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Demonstrated in practice

Scale effects, revealed in the lab

Results from projects with industry and research partners - published, forthcoming, or shared with permission.

mAb production · CHO · with bespark*bio

Replicating scaling effects for NISTCHO

Four parallel mAb productions: glass vessel (reference), 3D-printed vessel (material control) and two pDS inserts with 120 s and 230 s mixing time.

  • Delayed cell growth, but comparable peak viable cell density
  • Reduced product titer
  • Threefold higher cell-specific lactate production - consistent with oxygen gradients

NISTCHO is an open-access living reference material developed by NIST in collaboration with MilliporeSigma and NIMBL - a recombinant CHO cell line engineered to produce NISTmAb.

Satzer et al. · coming soon
3×cell-specific lactate in pDS vs. reference
120 s · 230 smixing times of the two pDS inserts
Bioreactors with pDS inserts at the Max Planck Institute Magdeburg
Vaccine · duck cells · with MPI Magdeburg

Solving scale issues in small scale

YF17D-vectored Zika vaccine candidate: scaling to a 200 L mimic slowed mixing from below 10 s to around 50 s, reduced growth slightly - and cost about 90 % of the virus yield.

  • Large-scale yield loss reproduced at bench scale
  • Small-molecule viral sensitizers tested directly in the pDS reactors
  • Production-scale titers recovered - 8.2× higher than without sensitizers
Göbel et al. 2025, Vaccines 13(7):757 →
CHO · with the University of Stuttgart

A 3 L reactor that mixes like 2,000 L

pH-shift mixing experiment followed by a CHO process: the 3 L reference mixed in a few seconds, the same reactor with a pDS insert in about 30 seconds - as expected for a 2,000 L XCellerex.

Read the full story →

3 L reference, 3 L with pDS and a 2,000 L XCellerex.

DREAM-bio · Minifors · with TU Wien

+75 % kLa improvement by repositioning the stirrers

Over 200 geometric variations in impeller number, position, and type - the best-performing design increased kLa by 75% compared with the base case, with predictions validated experimentally.

More about DREAM-bio →
200+variations
+75 %kLa
Publications

Read the studies

Göbel S. et al. (2025) - Optimization of YF17D-Vectored Zika Vaccine Production by Employing Small-Molecule Viral Sensitizers to Enhance Yields

Vaccines 13(7):757 · doi.org/10.3390/vaccines13070757

Arulrajah P. et al. (2025) - Scale-down bioreactors: comparative analysis of configurations

Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering · doi.org/10.1007/s00449-025-03182-w

Satzer et al. (2025) - CHO scaling effects with pDS inserts

Coming soon.

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Lena Achleitner
Lena AchleitnerSenior Bioprocess Engineer, Key Account Managerlena.achleitner@p4b.io