MediaAssist^TM is created to aid users in cell culture medium formulation and optimization.

• MediaAssist^TM provides data on the aqueous solubility of medium components to identify the upper limit of concentration for low-solubility components and help in preparing stock solutions of components.
• Some medium components might degrade or precipitate during culture or upon storage. The quantitative and qualitative data on the stability of medium components have been collated to alert the user to such stability issues.
• Nutrients are taken up by cells through transporters. Most transporters transport more than one substrate, and many substrates are transported by more than one transporter. Thus, the uptake of one substrate can be affected by the availability of another substrate. If two components have the same transporter (i.e., they share the transporters among them), they can affect each other's transport. MediaAssist^TM can alert users about such shared transporters and the transport mechanism.
• MediaAssist^TM includes specific uptake rate data, which is useful to estimate the cumulative demand of that medium component.
• MediaAssist^TM also alerts users about known co-dependencies between the two medium components.

MediaAssist^TM comprises four sections, each dedicated to a specific aspect of cell culture media components. Upon querying, the data can be viewed on the webpage or downloaded as an Excel file.

1. Formulation parameter gives the concentration of a component in publicly available cell culture medium formulations.
2. Chemical parameters provide: (i) aqueous solubility and (ii) chemical stability of a component. Chemical stability data includes the pH and temperature at which the stability was measured.
3. Biological parameters include: (i) Specific uptake rates (ii) Transporters involved in the uptake of the selected component. The transporters can be limited by their mechanism of transport, viz., uniport, symport, and antiport. (iii) Identification of components that share a transporter with the selected component, and (iv) Estimation of the cumulative requirement of a component for a desired cell growth profile based on user-specified specific uptake rate and cell growth data.
4. Co-dependencies between components: For the user-selected component, co-dependencies identify if there are any other components that affect the performance of the selected component in terms of affecting its stability/transport/cell viability/cell productivity/cell metabolism/cell growth. It also checks for co-dependency between a selected pair of components. If the two components are co-dependent and the co-dependency is transport-related, the user can check for shared transporters between the two components.

Cell culture medium optimization is crucial in the biopharmaceutical industry. Medium optimization techniques routinely involve changing the concentration of one or a few components. However, a change in a component's concentration may affect other components' transport, stability, or metabolism. The performance of one component may thus depend on the concentration of other components. This is referred to as ‘co-dependency.’ For example, there is a co-dependency between glutamate and cystine with respect to transport. Glutamate inhibits cystine uptake. This co-dependency might alert the user to check for cystine sufficiency if the medium design needs to increase the concentration of glutamate. Like this, MediaAssist^TM includes the other co-dependencies between medium components.

To calculate the requirement of a component:

• Scroll or type into the dropdown to select a component name.
• Enter the selected component's specific uptake rate (in pmol/cell/day). This value might be available to the user from their previous experiments, or else the user can estimate a range of specific uptake rates for the nutrient from published data collated in MediaAssist^TM.
• To provide time (in days) vs viable cell density (cells/ml) data, download the sample file template and open it in Microsoft Excel or a compatible editor.
• Replace the example data with your data while keeping the column headers unchanged. Do not modify or remove the first row.
• Save your file in .xlsx format.
• Upload the edited Excel file.
• Click on the “Calculate” button to get the nutrient requirement of the component in g/L.
• This calculation assumes the specific uptake rate (q) to be constant over the entire duration of the culture. If q changes during the culture, this calculation should be separately performed for each phase of the culture while q is constant.

The nutrient requirement is estimated by multiplying the user-specified specific uptake rate with the integral viable cell density (IVCD) calculated from the cell growth data provided.