Impact of apoptosis on the on-line measured dielectric properties of CHO cells.

Apoptosis is a common type of cell death in biopharmaceutical cell culture processes which causes decrease in viable cell density and product yield. The progression of apoptosis has been reported to influence the dielectric properties of mammalian cells; however, the on-line detection of these effects has been rarely described. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the on-line detectability of dielectric changes upon apoptosis induction in an industrial fed-batch process of CHO cells expressing a recombinant monoclonal antibody. Using capacitance signals, measured at 25 frequencies, the impact of apoptosis on the dielectric spectra was investigated in eight bioreactor cultivations in which various process conditions were combined with two different apoptosis induction strategies (camptothecin treatment and glucose starvation). To differentiate the apoptosis-related information from the cell concentration-associated variance in the multivariate capacitance datasets, principal component analysis (PCA) was used. A second principal component, explaining an explicit proportion (>20%) of the variance, was identified to be related to dielectric changes induced by apoptosis. Furthermore, the analysis of caspase-3 and -7 activation and DNA fragmentation showed that the detected dielectric change occurred in the early phase of apoptosis. The presented results verify that apoptosis has a considerable impact on the dielectric features of CHO cells and it can be monitored on-line with the introduced tool-set combining capacitance measurement with multivariate data analysis.