Bioreactor Design

Bioreactors have been used in the production processes of the food, biopharmaceutical, biochemical and tissue engineering industries over many years. A bioreactor can be any device or system designed to provide a biologically active environment. In our case, a bioreactor particularly refers to a device or system manufactured to culture cells or tissues in an environment that mimics in vivo conditions (e.g., nutrients, growth factors, and mechanical environment). These systems are being improved with applications in tissue engineering and biochemical engineering. Petri dishes, flasks, and plastic bags are the simplest bioreactors, which include a static chamber without any stirring component. Cells are placed inside cell culture media consisting of components within serum that provides the required microenvironment and are accountable for growth and differentiation of MSCs. To regulate the media, gas exchange, including oxygen and carbon dioxide, happens at the media/gas boundary. Spinner flasks, rotating-wall bioreactors, wave bioreactors, column bioreactors, hollow- fiber bioreactor are different types of available bioreactors.

One of the most recent design bioreactor is called e-incubator. e-Incubator is a high-field MRI compatible incubation platform, which enables repeated and noninvasive examination of the sample in a controlled environment and with minimum operator handling. This system supervises the culture environment including temperature, pH, and CO2 concentration along with providing media exchange automatically. The temperature, CO2 and pH were within acceptable incubation criteria.