Although cell culture is more than 100 years old, it has only been applied to the manufacture of biological drugs for about 25 years. Today mammalian cell culture is the workhorse production platform for most of biotech’s protein therapeutics and increasingly for cell- and virus-based vaccines.

After applications and processes, workflow optimization is the primary consideration when setting up a cell culture lab. Workflow relates to how samples and cultures move through the lab, the number of operations going on simultaneously, and chain of custody.

Isolating facility and layout from equipment during planning and maintenance of a cell culture lab
entails considerable risk, if for no other reason than the latter must fit into the former.

As Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan famously noted, “The medium is the message.” So it is with cell culture, where media and feed or supplementation strategies have been responsible for more improvement in cell productivity and performance than any other factors.

Contamination, the bane of cell culture work, occurs at every level, from high school labs using Petri dishes to large-scale manufacturing plants. Given the ubiquity of microorganisms, saying that contamination is inevitable is not an understatement.

In this Q & A, three experts from both academia and industry discuss the types of cell culture they perform in their labs, technologies they use, and the challenges they face.