An Analysis of Intra‐Versus Extracapillary Growth In a Hollow Fiber Reactor

Abstract

Mammalian cell culture in hollow fiber reactors is hampered by oxygen limitation. Diffusive oxygen transport from the fiber wall to the cells can be enhanced by increasing the sugace area for oxygenation andlor decreasing the penetration depth. One strategy for improving of sugace area to penetration depth ratio is to increase the number offibers in the reactor. An alternative way to manipulate this ratio is to grow the cells inside the fibers rather than on the outside. The theoretical analysis presented indicates that this is favorable when the volume of the extracapillary space exceeds that of the fiber lumen by a factor four or more. The impact of growing the cells on the inside of the fibers on other aspects of mammalian cell culture in hollow fiber reactors, including mass transport from the bulk ofthe medium flowing through the reactor to the fiber wall, is discussed.

Wall‐Growth hollow‐fiber reactor for tissue culture: I. Preliminary experiments

“…2 Large-scale culture in immobilized-cell reactors has distinct advantages over free-cell suspension reactors . 8 The cells are protected from the high shear that is found in stirred suspension cultures. Immobilized cells pack into dense colonies with cell concentrations two orders of magnitude higher than in suspensions.…”