Meeting Lot-Size Challenges of Manufacturing Adherent Cells for Therapy

Adherent cells such as adult primary cell lines and human multipotent (MSCs) and pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) present a manufacturing challenge as lot sizes increase from 10⁹ (billions) to 10¹² (trillions) cells (1). Typically, manufacturing platforms are good for one log of expansion. So new methods will be required to achieve commercially relevant lot sizes. Traditional two-dimensional culture methods have been used to grow anchorage-dependent cell types. Although such methods are reliable and well defined, they are very labor intensive and limited in scale-up production potential by the available growth surface area (Table 1). Allogeneic “off-the-shelf” therapies based on adherent-cell platforms may require manufactured lot sizes from 100 billion to a trillion cells depending on a given indication’s market size (2).

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