Applications of bio-capacitance to cell culture manufacturing

This review focuses on why bio-capacitance has developed to become the standard online method to estimate biomass in cell-based bio-manufacturing processes. There is now a good understanding behind the apparent divergence seen between bio-capacitance and trypan blue based cell counts in the later stage of culture through recent works in the field of process monitoring. Methods for how various authors have been able to correct the bio-capacitance signal when required are discussed in this work. There is also a focus on the diversification and development of the probes for single use and smaller bioreactors. The review then describes the wide range of applications where bio-capacitance probes have been able to improve productivity. It includes on-line process control of perfusion-based processes, predictive feeding control of bioreactors, applications with attached cells and viral production. The work discusses the importance of scalability and the ability to validate the probes prior to manufacture and also reveals the additional process information that can be gleamed from the technology.