Telstar minibioreactor handles six cultures at a time
Telstar, a European supplier of equipment for the life sciences, will next month launch the Telstar Hexascreen minibioreactor.
The company, headquartered in Spain, claims this is the first minibioreactor to allow animal cell culture trials and experiments on a scale of 10 to 15m. It has the capacity to handle six cultures at a time and a workstation accommodating single-use interchangeable plates to guarantee sterility and speed up the start of the bioprocess.
The minibioreactor will be included in the Telstar Cell Culture development range, which the company plans to grow. Telstar is currently designing, manufacturing and marketing other equipment for pharmaceutical, biotechnological and biomedical research, to which it will add the Hexascreen minibioreactors.
The minibioreactors have been developed as the result of an alliance between Telstar and Hexascreen Culture Technologies, which specialises in bioreactor applications for animal cell based processes, which Telstar recently joined through a shareholding acquisition.
The units offer change of medium, monitoring and control facilities similar to those of laboratory reactors, allowing the collection of information on the main culture variables, such as temperature, dissolved oxygen/oxygen consumption, pH, optical density and measurement of the spectrum in the visible range, while simultaneously monitoring growth (absorbance) and metabolism (indirectly from acidification/ oxygen consumption).
During 2010, Telstar will add a fed-batch model for growth and increased productivity of the cell culture.