HEURISTIC AND COMPUTATIONAL SIMULATION FOR THE DESIGN OF A CELL CULTURE SYSTEM

Abstract

A fermentative system in the technological development stage is aimed at the production of the pharmaceutically active ingredient (API) of a vaccine against Classical Swine Fever using the HEK293 cell line. The objective was to propose an optimization strategy applied to the design of the cell culture system using heuristics based on the analogy between the real experimental system and the computational simulation. To carry out the simulations of the process, the kinetic model was selected (Kontoravdi et al., 2007). It was shown that the real fermentation systems have been operated in far from optimal conditions and that their behavior responds to the wrong feeding regimen to the bioreactor that causes the accumulation of toxic metabolism products and the shutdown of the bioreactor. Based on these results, an optimization strategy is proposed that considers the specific characteristics of the cell culture system, the complexity of the selected kinetic model and that takes advantage of the MATLAB software features.