As McCarthy notes, "With the intensification, it's not just the reduced burden on plastics. You need less media to produce more cells; you need fewer consumables."
These benefits are extremely valuable to clinicians working in cell and gene therapies and researchers harvesting products from transfected cells, for example.
Cutting the Plastic Footprint Down to Size
TheCorning® Ascent™ Fixed Bed Reactor (FBR), features a packed polymer mesh which enables evenly distributed cell growth in a compact bioreactor footprint. This design accommodates scale-up vs. scale-out, which can help reduce a lab's plastic footprint. Cell and gene therapies require volume, which can be achieved by utilizing theAscent FBRsystem. In terms of sustainability, Ascent offers savings in its physical size and in the number of campaigns required to grow a given batch of cells. And intensification is streamlined due to the Ascent system's built-in linear scalability from 1 to 1,000 square meters.
"If we reduce footprint as we make more cells, then we also reduce the amount of plastic consumed," notes McCarthy. "We've moved from standard flasks to platforms with multiple layers that concentrate cell production on stacked layers. Now we are introducing the Ascent platform, which is really turbocharging the scale of production you can achieve in a small footprint."
Comparing plastic footprints of various consumables and platforms for cell culture shows this quite clearly. For example, compared to the standard culture vessels, a HYPERFlask offers the equivalent growth area of 23 U-75 standard flasks, but with less than nine times the amount of plastic. [internal Corning data source] The largest Ascent, with an FBR surface area of 1,000 meters square, has more than 133,000 times the growth area packed into a relativity small footprint.
In addition to these and other sustainability achievements from Corning's long history of life sciences innovation, McCarthy predicts that intensifying production will lead to even more opportunities for labs to enhance their sustainability efforts. Take a look at how Corning is influencingsustainability in life sciencestoday.