Culturing of Animal Cells, Stem Cells, Tissues, and Organs for Industrial Products: An Introduction

In recent years, culturing has developed from a small-scale business employed primarily for the in vitro testing of chemical compounds to a significant source of medicinal and prophylactic substances. The development of vaccines using adherent fibroblasts in roller bottles gave rise to industrial-scale cell culture; however, the predominant technique used now involves suspension-adapted Chinese hamster ovary or hybridoma cells in large-scale tanks. Bioengineers have faced challenges with designing and running bioreactors for decades. The ongoing development and improvement of the bioreactors have been driven by our ability to harness the forces of culture to produce products that are beneficial to human welfare. Today’s high yields of commercial products are the outcome of a coordinated effort to enhance culturing materials, expression vectors, screening techniques, media modification, and process development advancements. The technology for culturing has undergone significant advancement during the past three decades. The area saw significant growth and became crucial to biotechnology. It effectively merged a variety of fields over its evolution, including chemical engineering, genomics, protein chemistry, and genetic engineering. In this chapter, we present a general framework for the use of industrial equipment and procedures currently employed.