The analysis of lactic acid and other organic acids is important for characterization and monitoring of cell culture, where the chemical composition of media and/or fermentation broth provides significant and critical information on the changes occurring within these complex and dynamic systems. This information is required to comply with the FDA’s Quality by Design policy in guaranteeing high quality biopharmaceuticals. Furthermore, establishing an analytical technique that could be converted into a microfluidic device capable of simultaneous monitoring of the exact changes of key components concentrations through bioprocesses will have many applications in health sciences, especially in disease understanding, diagnosis, management and controlling.
A rapid Sequential Injection Capillary Electrophoresis (SICE) with capacitively coupled contactless conductivity detection (C4D) will be developed for the analysis of anions, specifically lactic acid, and other important organic acids and some cations. The first SICE system was developed in our group [1]. SICE could be considered as a powerful and reliable separation technique that well suited for bioprocess real time mentoring because of its high efficiency, complementary, selectivity and shorter analysis time when compared to other separation methods. Here, a similar analytical system is placed in an incubator for direct online monitoring of cell culture media in short few minutes time intervals, using only 1.5 mL for 72-96 runs over 24 hour.