Does you use protein extracts in your laboratory? Odds are, you are nodding your head ‘yes’. Protein extraction is an incredibly common lab technique, and is based in the cell lysis technique. However, laboratory experimentation with a small number of samples looks very different from that of a large-scale manufacturing lab.
Particularly in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, how do scientists take a technique that worked in the small-scale experimental setting and translate that to a large-scale facility? In this article, we will specifically analyze how cell lysis procedures can be scaled through homogenization, as homogenizers are the most frequently used cell lysis equipment.
- Determine what type of cell you will lyse and which intracellular component you are interested in isolating. Before progressing with any technique, it is essential that you and/or your collaborators have a clear understanding of why you are doing the technique and what its larger purpose will be. For example, you may be lysing a fungal cell to extract a specific protein for purification and ultimate incorporation in a pharmaceutical fungal cream.
- Select a company that manufacturers homogenizers for both laboratory and industrial use. By going through just one company, your procedure will have a significantly higher likelihood of accurate scalability. Additionally, completion of this step at the beginning of your work will ensure that you do not have to optimize your procedure more than once (which is also more cost-effective).
- Optimize your cell lysis procedure with a laboratory homogenizer.
- Test out your cell lysis procedure with an industrial homogenizer of the same brand. With high quality brands, odds are your procedure will scale nicely to the industrial homogenizer. If you are in the drug development industry and need to go pilot-plant before industrial, most companies that make scalable equipment should have pilot-plant homogenizers available in addition to laboratory and industrial.
Homogenizers function to reduce particle size and synthesize products that are frequently used in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, chemical, and food & beverage industries. A number of homogenizer makers have available different models for each phase of drug development; for example, Pion's BEE brand is renowned for their homogenization equipment and ability to help a customer through the drug development process. We offer laboratory homogenizers for R&D, pilot scale homogenizers for clinical trials, and industrial homogenizers for the manufacturing phase. The scalability of these homogenizers- e.g., a method that was successful with the laboratory homogenizer will also be successful with the industrial homogenizer- is a huge benefit that can save both time and cost.
When selecting a company that offers scalable cell lysis equipment, begin with Pion; not only do we offer high quality equipment, but we also offer customizable equipment and proprietary software to help optimize processes.
