Jemal Mohammed*, Worku Gemechu, Ayele Bizuneh and Yewynshet Tesera
Serum is the liquid form blood component prepared by centrifuging the whole collected blood from animals. In culture medium serum used to enhance the nutritional content of the medium for cell lines proliferation. However; it has some effects such as: serum is animal product therefore; its chemical composition is unknown to maintain consistence of the products, source of contaminant agents, based on the age; sex; geographic existence; climate and breeds of source animals serum components cause batch to batch variation of the products, the shortage of serum that didn’t meet the global need makes it very expensive medium components. There different animals those used to collect the serum are bovine, goat, sheep, horse, fish, porcine and other animals also serve as source of serum used for biopharmaceutical and biomedical researches. The most commonly used serum in culture medium to proliferate mammalian cell lines for rabies vaccine production is fetal bovine serum; due to its low immunoglobulin and other proteins than other sources. The proteins concentration in serum also hinders the downstream process of the products like in vaccine. Considering these effect of serum; there are several alternatives were developed to reduce, refine and replace the serum in medium by serum free chemically defined medium. Therefore; this reviews paper indicates the basic approaches to develop the alternative sources to replace the serum with other serum free medium and fetal bovine serum with other non-expensive serum sources
