Stirred bioreactors are essential for developing and commercializing biopharmaceuticals using microbial or mammalian systems, such as recombinant Escherichia coli or CHO cells (Chinese hamster ovary cells). These organisms differ significantly in morphology, metabolism, and process requirements, often necessitating tailored bioreactor designs with specific geometries, stirrers, and energy input strategies. Recent trends in process development favor miniaturized, parallelized cultivation systems to enhance throughput, reduce material consumption, and improve process understanding. To support this, a collaborative project with Levitronix GmbH focuses on developing a universal, seal-less, magnetically driven bottom-stirrer system suitable for microbial and cell culture applications. The system is scalable from mL to L benchtop formats and aims to simplify bioreactor selection while maintaining flexibility across diverse production organisms and process
conditions. The current results presented here are based on a bioreactor setup with a 600 mL working volume and the PMS-i30 magnetic mixer drive from Levitronix GmbH, demonstrating its suitability for small-scale, high-performance bioprocessing.