Dosing Considerations and Impacts on the Clarification of Mammalian Cell Culture Feed Streams Using Polydiallyldimethylammonium Chloride Flocculant in Conjunction with Clarisolve Depth Filters

The push for disposable technologies, coupled with increasingly higher cell culture densities, has placed a challenge on traditional solid liquid separation technologies.  To address this problem, the use of flocculation technologies has been utilized to enhance the filtration throughput and downstream purification operations.  However the dosing optimization of these very flocculants presents unique challenges on downstream purification steps as well as the issue of quantifying residual levels of polymer across major unit operations of downstream purification.  In this work EMD Millipore has demonstrated the application of the cationic flocculant, Polydiallyldimethylammonium chloride (pDADMAC), as an effective pretreatment method for mammalian cell culture harvest.  Dosing considerations and impacts as well as the effects on depth filtration, downstream purification, polymer toxicity and residual quantification will be discussed.