Cell Growth and Protein Expression Kinetics

Abstract

Typical experimental data on the mammalian cell growth and protein expression kinetics in batch and continuous bioreactors are discussed with the focus on maximizing the protein production. Two strikingly different patterns of growth‐associated and inverse‐growth‐associated production kinetics observed in continuous bioreactors at steady state are discussed along with plausible mechanisms for explaining this difference such as the specific cell cycle phase‐dependent gene expression models. Unstructured kinetic models developed for kinetics of mammalian cell growth, substrate utilization, and protein expression are discussed to highlight the successes and failures of this modeling approach in simulating the dynamics of cell growth and production. Structured kinetic models, which are more detailed and hence capable of addressing the complex metabolism of mammalian cells, are introduced briefly along with their difficulty of estimating the values for the increasing number of model parameters.