Bioreactors & Fermenters
Complete Scalable Bioreactor Platform From Cell And Strain Line Development to Commercial Manufacturing
Sartorius supports every customer with a fully scalable and interchangeable range of single-use or glass and stainless steel bioreactor solutions. The array of automated multi-parallel mini bioreactors and classic benchtop bioreactors supports fast and reliable development and characterization of your processes throughout all phases. Seamless transfer to pilot and production scale bioreactors are ensured by Sartorius thorough understanding of bioreactor design and scale-up principles, well-thought-out automation concepts and harmonized control strategies for oxygen, pH, temperature and feed addition.
Automated
The Sartorius industry-leading range of bioreactors have automated hardware and software features that allow users to develop consistent and reliable operating protocols for all stages of development to manufacturing.
Intensified
The bioreactors’ robustness along with integrated and readily available cell retention devices allow cultivation of cells at ultra-high densities - to intensify cell culture processing.
Predictive
Ambr® and Biostat® provide an integrated allied suite of technologies which allow you to use Quality by Design (QbD) principles to gain predictive results and to scale up effectively.
Bioreactors & Fermenters at a Glance
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FAQs - Bioreactors & Fermenters
Bioreactors can be separated into different types based on their material of construction, mechanism of mixing, working volume and overall purpose.
The most prominent disctintion is usually made between single-use and multi-use equipment. While for single-use bioreactors the disposable culture vessel is made out of a plastic material, multi-use vessels are made from glass or stainless steel and require cleaning and sterilization between process runs.
A very common mechanism of mixing is via a central stirring element in the culture vessel. This stirred-tank design has long been the gold standard for stainless steel bioreactors and is still followed for most single-use bioreactor systems. However, wave-mixing, or rocking motion technology can be a good alternative for shear stress sensitive cell lines. Here, mixing of gasses and nutrients is achieved through a rocking motion of the bioreactor.
As bioreactors can have working volumes as small as a few milliliter to up to several thousand liter, it is often differentiated between lab-scale, pilot scale and manufacturing scale bioreactor systems. A special subset of lab-scale bioreactors are multiparallel systems that allow multiple culture experiments to be run at the same time.
Finally, a distinction of bioreactor types is often made between mammalian cell culture and microbial culture bioreactors. Both cell types have very different requirements to their culture conditions, which is reflected in the design and configuration of specialized bioreactor systems.
In Europe “fermentor” and “bioreactor” are synonyms. In the US however, the term “fermentor” is dedicated for microbial systems and “bioreactor” is used for animal cell cultivation systems.
Resources on Bioreactors and Fermentation
Interview with Gerben Zijlstra on New Tools for Intensified Bioprocessing, ESACT 2019
Continuous processing in biomanufacturing has the potential to increase production capacity, reduce costs and improve biopharmaceutical product quality. View this video to learn more about the tools Sartorius offers and the outstanding product portfolio.
