Ask any scientist that has labored with cell cultures in a lab: contamination is excessive on their listing of fears. Even one stray bacterium or fungal spore can spoil a whole experiment.
Now think about scaling that danger as much as biomanufacturing, which makes use of residing cells to make a spread of stuff, together with medication, meals components, and industrial supplies. There, contamination doesn’t simply hamper productiveness, it has the potential to hurt the general public if, for instance, dangerous germs make their method into prescribed drugs.
Not desirous to take any probabilities, corporations take a scorched earth method to combating contaminants, blasting their gear with searing scorching steam. But it surely’s a pricey tactic: steam takes lots of vitality to supply, and the gear must be hardened towards the excessive temperatures and pressures that happen throughout sterilization.
“This was an method developed by Pfizer within the ’40s to make penicillin,” Brian Heligman, co-founder and CEO of Biosphere, informed TechCrunch. “And also you take a look at the unique programs, they give the impression of being sort of the identical as in the present day.”
Steam isn’t the one option to sterilize gear. One other is to develop cells in single-use reactors, which is wasteful. Ultraviolet (UV) mild is one other. But till lately, producing sufficient UV-C mild, which is required for decontamination, has been costly. Now, thanks partly to COVID, they’re rather a lot cheaper.
“Throughout the Covid period, you noticed lots of capital inflow into the manufacture of UV-C LEDs,” Heligman stated. “They’ll most likely get orders of magnitude cheaper within the subsequent decade.”
Heligman and his colleagues at Biosphere have spent the final two years designing a three-liter, glass benchtop bioreactor that may be sterilized completely by UV mild. Contained in the reactor, 4 shiny LEDs blast each a part of the chamber and its instrumentation. The startup is now testing eight of them as a part of a $1.5 million Division of Protection venture to discover methods to make use of biomanufacturing to supply high-performance oils.
Utilizing LEDs has the potential to convey down the price of biomanufacturing, permitting such processes to make supplies that beforehand would have been too costly.
“As you begin to have the ability to simplify the complexity of those programs, we expect we are able to push to a transformatively decrease flooring,” Heligman stated.
“You’ll be able to think about this like an electrification of the bioreactor,” he stated, including that changing costly chrome steel valves, traps, and different gear with LEDs and a cable ought to assist drive prices down considerably. What’s extra, as a result of the vessels received’t have to resist excessive temperature and stress, they could possibly be made out of cheaper supplies like plastics for sure purposes.
The corporate is presently working to construct a pilot bioreactor that may include round 100 liters and may be sterilized utilizing its expertise. After that, Heligman stated he’s fascinated by exploring designs that might be able to holding 40,000 to 80,000 liters.
Biosphere has raised $8.8 million in seed funding led by Lowercarbon Capital and VXI Capital, the corporate solely informed TechCrunch. Taking part buyers embody B37 Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, Founders Fund, and GS Futures.
