Bioreactors: a chemical engineering perspective

Despite breakthroughs in molecular biology that have opened up new synthesi s routes to pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals, biotechnology has not been widely deployed for production of high volume, low cost chemicals. It is ar gued that the pace of development for large-scale bioprocesses can be accel erated by increasingly applying basic principles of chemical engineering to gether with front line concepts of molecular biology. A fundamental underst anding of the coupling between kinetic, hydrodynamic, and transport process es in a bioreactor may also favorably impact process economics. The status and future opportunities in areas such as bioreaction kinetics, reactor sel ection, design, scale up and control are discussed. Several examples of how reaction engineering principles can lead to successful design and scale up and avoid common pitfalls are illustrated. Finally, the need to optimize t he integrated process, rather than just the bioreactor, is indicated. (C) 2 001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.