Year: 2016-17

Company: Spectrum Labs

Liaison(s): Michael Bransby

Spectrum Labs is a manufacturing company for filtration solutions for bioseparations and the perfusion cell culture biotech industry. The company is based in Rancho Dominguez, California, in the Los Angeles County area. The company boasts the largest inventory of hollow fiber membranes in the biopharmaceutical marketplace, supplying more than 2,000 innovative products through its locations in California, Texas, Japan, and the Netherlands. Spectrum has always been on the forefront of filtration technology, pioneering products such as dialysis membranes, disposable hollow fiber filtration modules and systems, supported polymeric liquid membranes and preparative low-pressure liquid chromatography products for use in pharmaceutical manufacturing and other industries, since 1997. The goal of the Spectrum Labs Team Masters Project is to evaluate the performance of the company’s new state of the art tangential filtration system. The team had the tasks of validating that Spectrum’s technology is capable of showing around 100% protein sieving regardless of protein concentrations, cell density or percent viability, through their novel filters, while also characterizing various mammalian Chinese Hamster Ovary ( CHO ) cell lines, and media formulation with respect to the filter performances such as showing if and when membrane fouling occur, quantifying pressure flow and various pressures on the system. The system features a novel hollow fiber configuration that minimizes membrane fouling, a phenomena which impairs current perfusion systems greatly, and costing biotech companies millions of dollars due to the inefficiency of these traditional filters. Spectrum has revolutionized the filtration system by offering a single use design and easily scalable capability, thus promises to greatly improve filtration efficiency and offer a promising perfusion solution for biopharmaceutical companies, by dramatically lowering the costs during perfusion cell culture campaigns.