By means of these cell lines, it was possible to develop standardised, chemically defined culture media that made it a lot easier to cultivate cells. Put together, these three developments permitted scientists to make use of cell, tissue and organ culture in their research (Ryan, ) .
Cell cultures are obtained when cells are surgically isolated from an organism and put into an appropriate culture environment, where they will attach, divide and grow. This is known as primary cell culture. There are different types of cell culture such as primary cell culture, secondary cell culture and cell line.
For cell biology and molecular biology, cell culture has become one of the main experimental tools. It is used in various fields such as: cancer research, toxicity testing, virology, model systems, cell-based manufacturing, drug screening, development, etc.
The reason for scaling up cell culture is based on different needs: to optimize the production of vaccines and complex proteins, to produce the quantities of cells needed for bioassays and in vitro toxicity assays and to grow artifically tissues and organs. Biopharmaceutical manufacturers are expecting a growing demand for monoclonal antibodies and recombinant protein production in the near future. They have calculated that global cell culture production capacity will not be enough to match the demand. This has resulted in a big development effort to enable efficient and economically viable large scale production of cell cultures. Large scale cell cultivation refers to 10,000 litres or larger (Marks 2003). Stirred tank bioreactors are what are normally used for large scale production. Biopharmaceutical manufacturers have turned to large scale stir tank cell culture manufacturing by putting into operation bio reactors at 10,000 to 20,000 litre scale (Glaser, 2000).
Problems.
A major and obvious problem for cell cultivation is contamination. There are two main types of cell culture contamination: chemical and biological.
