Morphology-Based Non-invasive Cell Quality Evaluation of Cellular Products in Regenerative Medicine

The advances in cell science are accelerating cell applications in cell-based therapeutics products, cell models for drug discovery, and cells for producing biologics. As a result, there is a highly growing demand for “human cells“to be manufactured on a large scale worldwide with the growth of cell-culture-related industries. However, quality control is one of the most critical bottlenecks in cell manufacturing. It is a fact that the present cell manufacturing facilities greatly rely on human skills and experiences. Therefore maximizing the consistency and efficiency of their process has been a challenge. The recent technological advances in image processing and machine learning provide great potential for developing non-invasive cell evaluation technology to support in-process monitoring and data-driven understanding to evolve the current expert-dependent cell culture into a more intelligent manufacturing process. This chapter will introduce the “morphology-based cell quality evaluation technique,” which enables quantitative morphological data collection, analysis, and modeling to accelerate non-invasive quality control during cell manufacturing. The concept, technique, and clues for constructing successful morphology-based cell evaluation are described.