Year: 2019-20

Company: Thermo Fisher Scientific

Liaison(s): Jeraldine Mendoza

Thermo Fisher Scientific is an American biotechnology product development company that was founded in 2006. Thermo Fisher provides many different technologies, including materials for antibody applications, single-use bioprocessing, laboratory equipment, cell culture media, and more. The goal of this laboratory-based project was to assess a panel of six non-commercially available media and two commercially available media with Keck Graduate Institute’s Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cell bank in order to compare cell culture performance across different media formulations. To complete this experiment, 3 CHO cell lines (CHO-S, CHO-K1, and CHO-DG44) were directly adapted to the provided media. A working cell bank was created from each cell-media combination for use in 14-day fed batch studies, which was followed by an analysis of the acquired data to determine the optimal media for each cell line. Cell culture conditions and cell growth profiles were monitored using in-house KGI equipment. Additionally, the team acquired proteomics and metabolomics samples to send to Thermo Fisher. Following the completion of shake flask studies, the optimal conditions were assessed in 3L bioreactors. The completion of this project has provided Thermo Fisher with an unbiased assessment of each provided media using KGI’s CHO cell lines.