Cell culture medium is the most significant cost driver for cultivated meat production. Optimizing bioreactors’ design and instrumentation, through additional monitoring features via sensors can help in decreasing these costs, and achieving maximum cell production capacity per unit medium volume. In Realsense1 (RS1) project, we focus on developing and testing novel low-cost sensors in the lab-on-a-chip environment i.e. microfluidic bioreactors, which enable significant reduction in time and cost of bioprocessing development due to the high degree of control over process variables through controlled fluid behavior characterized by the laminar flow, diffusion mixing and rapid energy dissipation. In the follow-up Realsense 2 project, we use mathematical modeling and computational fluid dynamics coupled to empirical data generated in RS1 to identify the most efficient configuration for integrating sensors into stirred-tank bioreactors. This webinar discusses both projects, presents current results on microbioreactor design and fabrication and specific developed sensors, as well as the next steps for further scale-up options.

This work was funded in the framework of projects REALSENSE1: Monitoring of cell culture parameters using sensors for biomass and nutrients/metabolites in media: Lab-on-a-Chip (LOC) approach, and REALSENSE2: From lab-on-a-chip to custom bioreactor: scale up modeling study, from the Good Food Institute 2018 and 2020 Competitive Grant Programs.