In situ 2D fluorometry and chemometric monitoring of mammalian cell cultures

The main objective of the present study was to investigate the use of in situ 2D fluorometry for monitoring key bioprocess variables in mammalian cell cultures, namely the concentration of viable cells and the concentration of recombinant proteins. All studies were conducted using a recombinant Baby Hamster Kidney (BHK) cell line expressing a fusion glycoprotein IgG1‐IL2 cultured in batch and fed‐batch modes. It was observed that the intensity of fluorescence signals in the excitation/emission wavelength range of amino acids, vitamins and NAD(P)H changed along culture time, although the dynamics of single fluorophors could not be correlated with the dynamics of the target state variables. Therefore, multivariate chemometric modeling was adopted as a calibration methodology. 2D fluorometry produced large volumes of redundant spectral data, which were first filtered by principal components analysis (PCA). Then, a partial least squares (PLS) regression was applied to correlate the reduced fluorescence maps with the target state variables. Two validation strategies were used to evaluate the predictive capacity of the developed PLS models. Accurate estimations of viable cells density (r2 = 0.95; 99.2% of variance captured in the training set; r2 = 0.91; 97.7% of variance captured in the validation set) and of glycoprotein concentration (r2 = 0.99 and 99.7% of variance captured in the training set; r2 = 0.99 and 99.3% of variance captured in the validation set) were obtained over a wide range of reactor operation conditions. The results presented herein confirm that 2D fluorometry constitutes a reliable methodology for on‐line monitoring of viable cells and recombinant protein concentrations in mammalian cell cultures. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2009;102: 1098–1106. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.