Microbes identified from monitoring cell manipulations in 5-year life of the Cell Factory G. Gaslini

Introduction: Quality and safety of a cell product, essential to guarantee the health of patients, depends on many factors including an appropriate environmental monitoring of the manufacturing rooms. Nonetheless, the maintenance of a controlled environment is requested to minimize the risk of contamination. Thus, a timely detection of changes in microbiological trends is important to adopt promptly effective measures against resistant strains that, in turn, may invalidate not only the sanitization procedures but also the safety of the cell product. Methods: We analyzed microbes found in our cell processing clean room over the last 5 years. We used 10.147 plates for air sampler, passive air monitoring and for checking instruments and operators of the production unit. Results: From these plates, 747 colonies were subjected to identification by the MALDI-TOF Vitek® MS system and the large majority of them was gram positive (97.8%) as witnessed by the finding that the most represented genera harvested from the classified areas were Staphylococcus (65%), Micrococcus (13%), Kocuria (8%) and Bacillus (5%). We never detected fungi. Most microbes found in the operators (both from class A and B) were collected from forearms and resulted of the Staphylococcus genus. Conclusions: The observed microbial contamination is to be attributed to the personnel and no substantial microbial pitfalls in our Cell Factory has been detected.