STERILITY MAINTENANCE – CRITICAL CONTROL POINT (CCP)

Sterility is the most important quality (CCP) of fermentors and bioreactors in laboratories, which must be easy to obtain and maintain for long time. In continuous processes, the culture must be sterile for several weeks or the resulting loss of time and money would be higher than the acquisition cost of the bioreactor itself (e.g. contamination of CHO cells or other animal cell lines are way too expensive).

LAMBDA invested time and energy to find out the optimal solution which ensures perfect sterility maintenance for each run.

Complete physical closure (sealing) of the vessel from the outer environment is achieved with one large central elastic membrane and the new non-rotational agitation system. The sterility is thus equivalent to magnetic coupling, but is considerably less complex and much less expensive.

Head plates are eliminated and the vessels are constructed with several side necks / ports which are completely sealed with permanent stoppers with multiple seals. The problem with replacement of deformed O-rings before each runs are avoided with these multipoint sealing stoppers.

Reliable peristaltic pumps offer stable and reproducible flow rates for several weeks without the risk of tubing rupture. All the tubing connections to ports and storage bottles are made aseptic with the special LAMBDA double-seal tubing connectors.

Although LAMBDA MINIFOR only takes minimal laboratory bench surface, the connections are easily accessible: side necks for the probes and ports are positioned at an angle of 30°. The gained space allows easy sterility maintanance.

MINIFOR fermentor and bioreactor vessel ports with LAMBDA septum for aseptic inoculation (small volume, multi-track needle channel) and other ports for aseptic large volume (single-track needle channels) like acid, base, antifoam, media supplements, harvest, feed, or sampling.

The number of sterile connections / ports to each side neck of the culture vessels can be customized.

Maintain aseptic conditions of batch, fed-batch or continuous fermentation and cell culture with the unique easy sterility concept of LAMBDA.