Dynamics in bioprocess development for Pichia pastoris

Pichia pastoris is a widely used host organism for the recombinant production of proteins. It is attracting increasing interest for the production of biopharmaceuticals, due to its capability of performing posttranslational modifications. Traditionally, production processes with P. pastoris describe fed-batch processes based on feed forward regimes with a constant specific growth rate. However, this strategy does not consider physiological changes of the organism, bearing the risk of overfeeding and thus harming the cells. Recently, we introduced the specific substrate uptake rate as a novel physiological parameter to design fed-batch strategies for P. pastoris. We showed that by doing dynamic batch experiments strain specific parameters, which are needed to set up respective feeding profiles, can be easily determined. Furthermore we proved that dynamics during feeding directly affects productivity and product purity. Here, we sum up our findings regarding dynamics in bioprocess development for P. pastoris.