The yeast Pichia pastoris, has been successfully used as an efficient
system to produce heterologous proteins [1]. Herein, we report the
development of a semi-continuous process to improve the production
of recombinant proteins in P. pastoris in BIONET’s F1 bench-top
3-liter bioreactor, equipped with a continuous process module (CPM).
Six repetitive batches were conducted in a semi-continuous process
by replacing 2/3 of the culture every 72-96 h. The overall process in a
3-liter culture yielded a protein concentration of 0.28±0.13mg·mL−1,
where over 650h were required to obtain 6±0.5 g of the total target
protein, while the equivalent amount of protein in a fed-batch would
require around 1100h in total, including inoculums, non-induced
stage and expression stage, achieving a reduction in the operation
time and cost when compared with the semi-continuous process with
fed-batch mode. These results suggest that there are promising possibilities to develop cost-effective processes, even when conditioned by
low dilution rates required by the culture, for the expression of recombinant proteins in P. pastoris in semi-continuous mode as an approximation to a continuous process