What does a bioprocess look like?

So, we know that bioprocessing means producing something by using living cells.

Bioprocessing can be used to make hundreds of products from antibiotics and vaccines, to cell & gene therapies, to biofuels, to commercial products like sweeteners (Aspartame) or meat substitutes (Quorn).

But how does a bioprocess actually work?

Typical chemical processing

Normally, when you are making a product chemically, you have a process that looks like this:

Of course, this is very simplified. But the point is that you put some stuff together, you put it in a reactor, chemical reactions occur and you get new stuff (your product).

How bioprocessing is different

In bioprocessing, your product is formed by living cells. In other words, the cells are your mini-reactors. Your job as an engineer or a scientist is to make sure that the cells have the optimal conditions to produce the desired product. For example, cells would need enough oxygen and a nice temperature – not too cold but not too hot.

Hence a cell could be pictured like a bioreactor:

So, you give A and B to the cell, these could be glucose and oxygen for example, and it produces P – your product. Cool, right?

In reality, you have to take care of a lot more things than A and B, and your cell will produce a lot more that just P.

A more realistic schematic:

Two things to notice here:

1. There are a lot of factors to take care of to make sure the cells have a good environment to make product in.
2. There are a lot of things a cell produces apart from the product – these need to be removed from the final formulation.

These two considerations give rise to the two main parts of a bioprocess: upstream and downstream.

Upstream and Downstream

Upstream processing refers to the part of the process from picking the correct cell type, to cultivating it, to growing it and making it produce the things you want it to produce.

Downstream processing is concerned with everything that follows after your product is formed. This includes all the isolation and purification steps that are needed to separate the product from everything in the mixture, as well as the formulation of the product from a container of cloudy liquid into a sealed package that can be distributed.

Upstream are downstream are described in more depth in the “Upstream processing” and “Downstream processing” categories.