| Mammalian cell culture processes face numerous challenges
related to compressed product development cycles, capacity shortages, and
the proliferation of cell lines and culture conditions. Underlying these
efforts is the need for rapid, reliable techniques for monitoring cell
viability at every stage of development, scale-up, and manufacturing.
Conventional offline techniques for monitoring culture conditions are
time- and labor-intensive, and incompatible with modern development
and manufacturing timelines.
The Guava Personal Cell Analysis (PCA™) system simplifies complex
cellular assays and shortens analysis times. Through its use of microlitersized
samples, the Guava PCA system reduces sample loss, and waste
generation and handling. Guava PCA assays include automated analysis
of cell number and viability, detection of protein expression, cell cycle
analysis and apoptosis screening
In this note, we describe our studies comparing assays for cell number,
viability, and apoptosis run on the Guava PCA system with standard
microscopy methods.We assayed multiple cell lines of interest in bioprocess
development and manufacturing. Cell count and viability results
obtained using Guava® ViaCount® were compared with results from manual
hemacytometer counting using trypan blue exclusion to assess cell
viability. We compared apoptosis assay results obtained using the Guava
Nexin™ application with results from manual counts of acridine orange
and propidium iodide stained cells over a time course of apoptotic induction.
The Guava PCA system yielded comparable results to standard
methods with a high degree of reproducibility between experiments and
operators. Large numbers of cells could be analyzed rapidly using the
Guava PCA, producing data with higher statistical validity. |
