Dr.-Ing. Thomas Wucherpfennig

Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH & Co. KG
Bioprocess Development Biologicals

Binger Strasse 173

55216 Ingelheim am Rhein

Phone +49 7351 54-144806

Mail Dr. Thomas Wucherpfennig


Thomas pursued the study of Biotechnology at the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, and Chemical Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He earned his PhD in Bioprocess Engineering from the Technical University of Braunschweig. Prior to joining Boehringer Ingelheim as a postdoctoral fellow in 2014, Thomas acquired valuable experience in the industrial biotech sector at Roche and Clariant. Since 2015, he has held various roles in cell culture process development at Boehringer Ingelheim and currently serves as a Senior Principal Scientist, spearheading late-stage process development. In addition, Thomas is a lecturer at FH Oberösterreich in Wels and TUHH – Hamburg University of Technology, His research focus is on bioprocess scale-up, bioreactor characterization, Process Analytical Technology (PAT), and cell culture process modeling.

Research Interests

  • Scale-up of bioprocesses
  • Bioreactor characterization
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
  • Process Analytical Technology (PAT)
  • Cell culture process modelling

Publications

[185010]
Title: Establishment of a CFD‐based kLa model in microtiter plates to support CHO cell culture scale-up during clone selection.
Written by: Wutz, J., Steiner, R., Assfalg, K. and Wucherpfennig, T.
in: <em>Biotechnol Progress</em>. (2018).
Volume: <strong>34</strong>. Number: (5),
on pages: 1120-1128
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/btpr.2707
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Abstract: Microtiter plates are a common tool for clone selection in biopharmaceutical development. A way of visualizing and evaluating these systems and key processes parameters is the application of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). CFD is a powerful tool for the modelling of hydrodynamics and mass transfer parameters. In this work, CFD was used to determine the specific surface area, the volumetric power input and the oxygen mass transfer coefficient kLa for two different microtiter plates with different scales (100 μL - 5 mL). For this purpose, a new method of predicting the kLa is presented and calibrated with literature data. Scaling effects in shaken microtiter plates are evaluated by comparing two culture volume scales under various operating conditions. To test validity of these models, three different Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma proprietary CHO production cell lines with different growth characteristics were cultivated using the respective microtiter plates under different conditions until limitations in growth and viability were observable. The cell culture data then was compared to different parameters obtained by CFD. The calculated kLa values match the cell culture performance in the 96-deepwell by predicting lowered oxygen transfer with increasing culture volume and decreasing orbital velocity. The same cells behave differently in the 6-deepwell scale. Here, the overall larger shear stress might cause physical stress for the cells. The kLa model predicts overall higher shear rates for this system, supporting the experimental findings.