The future of media hydration: balanced media in automated single-use platforms

What is driving the need for ideas like Oceo Rover within the industry?

GM: Bioprocessing continues to grow with multiple product modalities in the market such as mAbs, antibody-drug conjugates, cell and gene therapies, as well as RNA-based products. Ever-increasing demand for these therapies is continuing to push our industry to develop more optimised workflows that can ensure consistent and cost-effective manufacturing.

What is the reason for developing such a transformative product?

GM: If you look at what the industry does today to make up a media feed or buffer, you will see that the process has not changed for decades. The process involves weighing out subcomponents and creating complex powder mixtures, then blending those components before transferring them through the facility. Finally, the blended material is hydrated. Additional adjustments such as pH or osmolality are often required before final sterile filtration; only then is the material ready to use.

Simplifying this process would have huge benefits for the industry. If the powders were pre-formulated and the process ran on an automated platform, most of the manual process steps could be eliminated and human error reduced, enhancing overall process efficiency.

How does the Oceo Rover work?

GM: The Oceo Rover is an integrated platform for powder hydration, combining automation and single-use technology that follows a simple LOAD.SET.GO. process. We have taken a complex, time-consuming, multiple-step process, and developed a consistent, fully contained and automated, single-unit operation process. We develop formulations to ensure that the right set of medium components are fully hydrated and in the correct sequence to avoid any unfavourable interactions. We refer to this process as “balancing the medium.” Every medium developed for Oceo Rover is ready-for-use in a balanced formulation. The combination of a balanced formulation and correct automation recipe enables the Oceo Rover to deliver a correctly formulated medium, feed or buffer every time.

What are the benefits of using the Oceo Rover?

GM: Oceo Rover is a game changer. What took six to eight hours to prepare can now be completed in less than two hours. A typical media makeup instruction can involve five to 20 steps, as well as post-hydration adjustments. The Oceo Rover replaces this lengthy process with three easy steps: LOAD the cartridge, SET the recipe, press GO.

Oceo Rover works across a variety of volumes, from 200L to 5,000L for buffers and 200L to 1,700L for media, which means you have a smaller footprint. The system also reduces the storage of large volumes of liquid – a pre-packed cartridge is equivalent to a 1,000L tote, reducing shipping costs and environmental impact.

The Oceo Rover addresses delivery, storage and the manual mixing challenges, delivering large volumes of consistent solutions on demand. Facilities can operate in continuous mode without needing to invest in large media, feed, buffer preparation and storage systems. The simplified one-touch Oceo Rover system takes less space, maintenance and labour than traditional systems, decreasing turnaround times and driving productivity.

At FUJIFILM Irvine Scientific, innovation and service are always our main priorities. As we develop more services around Oceo Rover, we will continue to search for ways to improve, simplify and standardise bioproduction workflows and give our customers more of what they need to develop lifesaving therapies for patients. 

For more information about the Oceo Rover or to schedule a demonstration, please visit: www.irvinesci.com/oceorover

About the author

Guy Matthews is Director of Market Development Single-Use Technology, Fujifilm Irvine Scientific Inc, (FISI). He has worked in the biopharmaceutical industry all his career and has seen the implementation of single-use technologies from the beginning. He began as a microbiologist at a CMO in the UK, before moving into more commercial roles. Guy has experience of both upstream and downstream processing, the focus being on the application of single-use technology to drive safety, productivity and accessibility.