TAP Biosystems reports that Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, has selected its Ambr bioreactor system to conduct research aimed at determining the optimum process conditions for economical manufacturing of stem cells.
Ambr bioreactor from TAP may lead the way to cheaper stem cells
Ambr will be used at the university’s new Stem Cell Engineering Center to culture mouse and human pluripotent stem cell lines, and to train researchers in stem cell biomanufacturing.
The US National Science Foundation has provided funding for at least 30 scientists to be trained under the Integrated Graduate Education Research Training programme in stem cell production.
“Our research requires automation and a rigorous approach, and we initially considered developing our own equipment for stem cell biomanufacturing. We heard about Ambr, which is ideal for studying a large number of parameters that could affect stem cell growth and differentiation, and elected to use it to predict stem cell performance in large scale bioreactors”, observed Dr Todd McDevitt, director of the Stem Cell Engineering Center.
“The cost of generating many types of stem cells at scale is currently prohibitive, and suspension culture processes may allow larger quantities of more affordable stem cells to be produced. Through this research, Ambr could be instrumental in delivering cell lines for drug discovery assays, and enabling allogeneic cell therapies to become more readily available”, added Dr Barney Zoro, Ambr product manager at TAP.