Figure 1: Process overview of an integrated continuous antibody production with perfusion bioreactor system, continuous capture system and a system for polishing, inspired by Schwartz et al 2022.
The integrated continuous process platform was well suited to be a testbed for studies of novel processing step, new analytical tools, data management, automation, real-time monitoring and control, and other digital solutions. Based on experiences a general platform, see Andersson et al 2022, for development studies and validation of digital solutions needs following features:
A lab-scale platform that contained all these features made it possible to implement and validate novel digital solutions with minimal resources. The lab-scale size reduced the amount of material needed to do long-time runs. Automation of the processing together with the support system means that operation can be unmanned or remote. The previous work was only manned during office hours, unmanned during nights and over weekends. This resulted in that efforts could be focused on implementing digital solutions at different levels of the complex system, some will be discussed below.
Local supervisory controller
The instruments are controlled with a local supervisory controller. An overview of the architecture can be seen in Figure 2, where it’s divided into an orbit kernel, user code and application library. The user configures the system and designs a script defining the sequence of phases that should be executed, where each phase consists of the methods from the application library. The application library often shares many methods but is unique for every specific setup. For each local orbit a system configuration is defined and a method library for the current setup. The controller also handles tasks such as sampling, database communication and network communication with other orbits.