Featured Technology Spotlight · In collaboration with IamFluidics
For decades, adherent cell culture has relied on a compromise. Cells need surfaces to grow on, especially in large bioreactors, but those same surfaces often become obstacles once the cells need to be harvested. In many manufacturing workflows, the harvesting step introduces mechanical stress, additional handling, lower viability, and significant cell loss. As industries like cell therapy, cultivated meat, and regenerative medicine move toward larger-scale production, that bottleneck becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.
Microcarriers Designed to Disappear
IamFluidics has developed a dissolvable microcarrier for adherent cell culture in suspension bioreactors. The particles act as miniature growth surfaces, supporting efficient cell attachment and expansion during cultivation. Once the culture is complete, the microcarriers dissolve using standard harvesting reagents such as TrypLE™ and EDTA, creating a single-cell suspension without the need for physical carrier separation.
Traditional solid microcarriers often require combinations of enzymatic detachment, shear force, sieving, washing, and filtration steps to recover cells. Those downstream operations can reduce yield, increase process complexity, and make scaling more difficult.
“One of the key limitations in current adherent cell culture workflows is the harvesting step,” says Maik Schot, bioprocessing expert at IamFluidics. “We developed dissolvable microcarriers to simplify that process while improving yield and scalability.”
Figure 1. Dissolvable microcarriers fully dissolve into a single-cell suspension after addition of TrypLE™ and EDTA, enabling >90% cell recovery within 15 minutes. Data shown as mean ± SD (n=3).
The company’s system combines an alginate-based hydrogel core with a collagen-derived coating designed to better mimic the extracellular environment cells naturally experience in the body. Unlike rigid polystyrene carriers, the softer hydrogel substrate operates in a more physiological stiffness range, potentially supporting more favorable cell-material interactions.
The particles also remain transparent during culture, making it easier to visually monitor cell attachment and proliferation under the microscope.
In studies with mesenchymal stem cells grown inside the Osilaris™ 1.2L rocking bioreactor, the dissolvable microcarriers reportedly enabled cultures to reach approximately 1.3 billion cells within 14 days, with doubling times comparable to conventional systems. The higher final yields appeared to result primarily from stronger initial cell attachment, more effective bead-to-bead transfer throughout the culture process, and efficient cell harvesting.
According to IamFluidics, the harvesting process achieved greater than 90% cell recovery, with complete dissolution occurring in approximately 15 minutes.
Building Bioprocessing Tools Around Cell Behavior
IamFluidics focuses on precision microparticle engineering for healthcare and life sciences applications. The company’s broader platform is built around its proprietary IN-AIR MICROFLUIDICS™ technology, which enables scalable and highly controlled particle production.
What makes this work interesting is that the company is not simply redesigning a consumable. The team approaches microcarriers as engineered biomaterials that influence how cells behave, how processes scale, and how efficiently manufacturing systems operate downstream.
That becomes increasingly relevant as industries move toward larger bioreactors, automated manufacturing, and dose-scale production of adherent cells. Small improvements in harvesting efficiency can translate into meaningful reductions in media consumption, process time, labor, and manufacturing cost.
The dissolvable microcarrier platform is already commercially available for research applications and is currently being evaluated for broader GMP-compatible manufacturing workflows.
At Lab Grown Technologies, we celebrate the people behind emerging technologies. Congratulations and a warm thank you to all the inventors behind this technology: Barbara de Klerk, Jos Olijve, Maik Schot, Vasileios Trikalitis, Tom Kamperman and colleagues for contributing to new approaches in scalable adherent cell culture.
This article is part of a paid technology feature in collaboration with IamFluidics, highlighting innovations that may help accelerate scalable cell manufacturing.