6:00pm: Social Hour | 7:00pm: Dinner | 8:00pm: Speaker
Bothell Room @ the Hilton Garden Inn, Bothell (22600 Bothell Everett Highway) | map
Click here to view Anna's slides (PDF).
Speaker Bio and Presentation Abstract
Anna Senczuk graduated from the University of Calgary with M.Sc in Cell and Molecular Biology. Anna worked at the Medical School in Calgary as an Associate, at Immunex and currently at Amgen as a Scientist in Process Development. Anna specializes in HIC (owns a patent on Dual Salt-HIC) and currently works in Harvest pre-treatment at Amgen. In her current work, she is trying to understand how particle distribution impacts filterability. Anna's publications include protein-protein interactions, protein-resin interactions and HIC. Her work has been presented at two HIC Conferences and Purification of Biologicals.
Title: Particle distribution and cholesterol level as predictors of cell culture flocculation and filterability performance.
Anna Senczuk, Yinges Yigzaw, Anne Thomas, Rob Piper, Tom McNerney
Recent advances in increasing monoclonal antibody titer using high density mammalian cell culture process have led to challenges in harvest operations (centrifugation and depth/sterile filtration). Cell culture flocculation has improved the performance of the centrifugation and depth filtration steps. Understanding how these flocculating agents improve clarification efficiency is important to define a robust process. Thus factors that may be contributing to filter plugging such as particle size distribution and lipids were investigated. In general settled or centrifuged supernatants of flocculated cell culture have higher mean particle size compared to untreated cell culture fluid. Increased mean particle size consistently correlated with increased filterability. The increase in mean particle size was attributed to decreased counts in the lower particle size ranges indicating that these sizes are primarily responsible for filter fouling. Interestingly, increased filtration capacity was correlated to lower cholesterol level in the filter feed material regardless of flocculation method used. Therefore, cholesterol level may be promising marker in flocculation/filtration studies.