Year: 2017-18

Company: Spectrum Labs

Liaison(s): Mike Bransby, Philip Yuen

Spectrum Labs is based in California and provides filtration solutions for perfusion cell culture and bioseparations for the biomanufacturing industry. The company has been on the forefront of filtration technology, providing the largest inventory of hollow fiber membranes in the biopharmaceutical marketplace and supplying more than 2,000 innovative products worldwide. In 2017, Repligen Corporation acquired Spectrum for $359 million, making their combined portfolio the broadest offering of hollow fiber and flat sheet filtration technologies.

Continuous processing and single-use technology have become target strategies to enable the shift towards multi-modality, flexible manufacturing—driving creation of novel technologies for bioprocessing. Spectrum produces single-use technologies to combat bottlenecks within continuous bioprocessing. To address fouling and decreased sieving capacities of standard tangential flow filters (TFF), Spectrum has produced a novel tangential flow depth filter (TFDF)—integrating benefits of TFF and depth filtration to increase dirt capacity and maintain high protein passage.

This TMP supports TFDF development and optimization through characterizing next generation configurations for perfusion and protein harvest. For perfusion application, the team is validating the performance of TFDF in maintaining high cell retention, nearly 100% sieving, and low transmembrane pressure profiles at higher cell densities. Additionally, the TMP is advancing Spectrum’s efforts in improving protein harvest using TFDF. The team is screening TFDF specifications in harvest experiments to identify optimal configurations based on filter performance endpoints of sieving, clarification, and capacity. These two focal experiments serve to optimize novel TFDF configurations for perfusion and harvest applications and to guide Spectrum’s understanding of its mechanism.