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 complete experiment.
Now think about scaling that danger as much as biomanufacturing, which makes use of residing cells to make a variety of stuff, together with medication, meals substances, and industrial supplies. There, contamination doesn’t simply hamper productiveness, it has the potential to hurt the general public if, for instance, unhealthy germs make their approach into prescription drugs.
Not desirous to take any possibilities, corporations take a scorched earth strategy to combating contaminants, blasting their gear with searing sizzling steam. But it surely’s a pricey tactic: steam takes quite a lot of power to supply, and the gear must be hardened in opposition to the excessive temperatures and pressures that happen throughout sterilization.
“This was an strategy developed by Pfizer within the ’40s to make penicillin,” Brian Heligman, co-founder and CEO of Biosphere, informed TechCrunch. “And also you have a look at the unique programs, they appear form of the identical as immediately.”
Steam isn’t the one strategy to sterilize gear. One other is to develop cells in single-use reactors, which is wasteful. Ultraviolet (UV) gentle is one other. But till lately, producing sufficient UV-C gentle, which is required for decontamination, has been costly. Now, thanks partly to COVID, they’re quite a bit cheaper.
“In the course of the Covid period, you noticed quite a lot of capital inflow into the manufacture of UV-C LEDs,” Heligman mentioned. “They’ll in all probability 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 gentle. Contained in the reactor, 4 vivid 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 project to discover methods to make use of biomanufacturing to supply high-performance oils.
Utilizing LEDs has the potential to deliver 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 mentioned.
“You possibly can think about this like an electrification of the bioreactor,” he mentioned, 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 face up to excessive temperature and stress, they could possibly be made out of cheaper supplies like plastics for sure functions.
The corporate is at the moment working to construct a pilot bioreactor that may include round 100 liters and may be sterilized utilizing its expertise. After that, Heligman mentioned he’s serious about 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 completely informed TechCrunch. Collaborating traders embrace B37 Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, Founders Fund, and GS Futures.
