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Ask any scientist that has worked with cell cultures in a laboratory : Contamination is gamy on their list of fears . Even one stray bacterium or fungal spore can violate an entire experimentation .
Now imagine scaling that peril up tobiomanufacturing , which habituate life cells to make a range of clobber , including drug , food fixings , and industrial materials . There , contamination does n’t just handicap productivity , it has the electric potential to harm the public if , for case , speculative germ make their mode into pharmaceutical .
Not want to take any fortune , companies take a scorched earth approach to combat contaminants , blasting their equipment with searing hot steam . But it ’s a costly maneuver : Steam take up a lot of energy to make , and the equipment has to be hardened against the gamey temperature and pressures that take place during sterilization .
“ This was an approach developed by Pfizer in the ’ 40s to make penicillin , ” Brian Heligman , co - founder and CEO ofBiosphere , recount TechCrunch . “ And you look at the original systems , they appear kind of the same as today . ”
Steam is n’t the only way to sterilize equipment . Another is to grow cell in individual - economic consumption nuclear reactor , which is uneconomical . Ultraviolet ( UV ) visible radiation is another . Yet until of late , generating enough UV - C light , which is require for decontamination , has been expensive . Now , thanks in part to COVID , it is a circle cheaper .
“ During the COVID era , you saw a lot of uppercase influx into the industry of ultraviolet illumination - ampere-second light-emitting diode , ” Heligman read . “ They ’ll probably get order of magnitude cheaper in the next 10 . ”
Heligman and his workfellow at Biosphere have spent the last two age designing a three - liter glassful benchtop bioreactor that can be desexualize entirely by UV light . Inside the reactor , four brilliant LEDs eruption every part of the sleeping room and its instrumentation . The startup is now testing eight of them as part of a $ 1.5 million Department of Defenseprojectto explore way to utilize biomanufacturing to develop gamey - execution oils .
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Using LEDs has the potential to convey down the cost of biomanufacturing , permit such processes to make materials that antecedently would have been too expensive .
“ As you start out to be able to simplify the complexness of these systems , we think we can campaign to a transformatively lower flooring , ” Heligman said .
“ you may reckon this like an electrification of the bioreactor , ” he allege , adding that replacing expensive stainless steel valve , traps , and other equipment with LED and a cable length should help drive costs down importantly . What ’s more , because the vessels wo n’t have to withstand gamey temperature and pressure level , they could be made out of cheaper material like plastics for sealed applications .
The party is presently work to build a archetype bioreactor that can comprise around 100 liters and can be sterilized using its applied science . After that , Heligman said he ’s interested in exploring designs that would be capable of holding 40,000 to 80,000 liters .
Biosphere has raised $ 8.8 million in seed funding led by Lowercarbon Capital and VXI Capital , the companionship exclusively told TechCrunch . Participating investors let in B37 Ventures , Caffeinated Capital , Founders Fund , and GS Futures .
