Colder Products Company Discusses Single-Use Connector Applications

Pharmaceutical Online’s Lori Clapper talks with John Boehm about obstacles that stand in the way of single use, including scale. He discusses the applications that drove the development of the expanded connector sizes.

Hi, I’m Lori Clapper, the editor with Pharmaceutical Online here at INTERPHEX 2012. I’m at the Colder Products company booth here at INTERPHEX, with John Boehm. John, thank you so much for talking with me today.

Thank you, Lori.

I want to start out asking you about some of the obstacles that kind of stand in the way of manufacturers to furthering the adoption of single-use.

One of the big challenges that manufacturers have today in the adoption of single-use is scale. There’s been sort of a bread and butter in the middle in a ½”and 3/8^th holes.

Now, the question is how do they do these processes as small scale, but then range upscale as we replace stainless with plastic technologies? How do we have the technologies to make those things work at the higher scales, as well as the lower scales?

How do single-use connectors, that you know a lot about, how do they overcome those problems?

With single-use, sterile connectors in particular, we’re allowing closed systems. The ability to bring two different operations, say, a bag system to a chromatography skid and do that in a sterile fashion, that’s been becoming common in the ½”, 3/8^th sizes. But to be able to do that in larger and smaller flows, we’ve got connector technologies that are now moving smaller in addition to larger, to address those needs.

Back to that, what are some of the applications that drove the development of these different sizes of connectors?

With our new AseptiQuik S, or small-flow connector, applications on the cell culture side, be it development in the cell culture trays or bottles that need a smaller tubing size, or even sampling out of a bioreactor where you need to take a small sample, or you don’t want a large connector where the volume of flow or product would be wasted, you want to do that in a nice, small connection and that’s really driven the development of this.

On the other hand, we mentioned single-use bioreactors. If you have a 1000-liter or 2000-liter mixer or reactor, the time to harvest can be in the hours. By going to a large 1” flow versus a ½” flow, we can do that at three and a half times the flow. You go down from hours to minutes, in many cases. That’s a real advantage for the manufacturing process.