Alginate‐Polylysine Microcapsules of Controlled Membrane Molecular Weight Cutoff for Mammalian Cell Culture Engineering

Abstract The search for more productive mammalian cell culture techniques has been primarily driven by the need to increase both the cell density and product concentration. In the technique used in our laboratory, microencapsulation, hybridoma cells were grown and monoclonal antibody was entrapped within microcapsules, which had a controlled membrane molecular weight cutoff. In our studies it was shown that using the alginate‐poly‐l‐lysine (PLL) microcapsule system and protein diffusion experiments, the capsule membrane molecular weight cutoff could be controlled from 20 × 10 3 to 300 × 10 3 . This was achieved by increasing the viscosity average molecular weight (Mv) of the LL, used in the encapsulation procedure, from 14 × 10 3 to 525 × 10 3 and…