Animal Cell Technology

The use of animal cell technology has made tremendous progress in human healthcare. With the advent of recombinant DNA and hybridization technology, it is now possible to manufacture many complex therapeutic proteins using animal cells, which otherwise could not be produced or isolated from natural sources. Cells are directly involved is regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. As a result, the future of healthcare relies on the progress of animal cell technology. Divided into four sections and sixteen chapters, this book is intended for students of diverse academic backgrounds from basic biology to bioengineering. Since animal cell technology reuqires proper understanding of cell biology, DNA technology, immunology and bioengineering, the goal of this book is to amalgamate knowledge from these fields and pass it on to the readers who intend to start professional carriers in academic or industrial research. An animal cell is a unique factory, where thousands of genes are encoded and transcribed; products are translated, and finally processed into biologically active molecules. It is therefore important to understand the inside of a cell, how cellular functions are coordinated, limitation of cells, reasons for proliferation, and cellular death. The very first section of the book deals with the basic biological aspects of cells and how they function. The second section discusses basic cell culture technology. This section covers the preservation of animal cells, cell culture medium, culture environment, good manufacturing practices and equipment, quantitative analysis, etc. In the third section, recombinant therapeutic proteins, large-scale cell culture, and scale-up processes are discussed. The fourth section provides glimpses of the advanced studies, where therapeutic applications of cells and tissues have been discussed. Embryonic and somatic stem cells, cloning, and tissue engineering are the main subjects of this section. Finally, the future perspective of animal cell culture technology has been discussed in the concluding section.