Ask any scientist who's worked with cell cultures in the lab: contamination is high on their list of fears. Even a bacterial or fungal infection can spoil the entire experiment.
Now consider that risk magnified. Biological productionMedicines Living cells are used to make many things, including food ingredients and industrial materials. Pollution there not only interferes with productivity; For example, harmful germs could pose a risk to the public if they end up in pharmaceuticals.
Not wanting to take any chances, companies use earth-moving methods to combat pollution, blasting their stuff with hot steam. But it's a costly strategy: Steam requires a lot of energy to produce, and materials must be hardened to withstand the high temperatures and pressures generated during sterilization.
“It's an approach Pfizer developed in the '40s to make penicillin,” said co-founder and CEO Brian Heligman. Biological domaintold TechCrunch. “And if you look at the original systems, they look the same as they do today.”
Steam is not the only way to sterilize equipment. Another thing is that growing cells in disposable reactors is wasteful. Ultraviolet light is another light. Until recently, Generating enough UV-C light, which is necessary to clean pollution, is expensive. Now, thanks in part to COVID, They are much cheaper.
“During the Covid era, you've seen a lot of capital go into manufacturing UV-C LEDs,” Heligman said. “In the next decade, they will be orders of magnitude cheaper.”
Heligman and his colleagues at Biosphere have spent the past two years designing a three-liter glass benchtop bioreactor that can be completely sterilized by UV light. Inside the reactor, four bright LED lights illuminate every part of the room and its equipment. The startup is now testing eight of them as part of the Department of Defense for $1.5 million. Project To find ways to use bio-production to produce high-performance oils.
The use of LEDs has the potential to lower the cost of bioproduction; Such processes allow the creation of previously very expensive materials.
“As we can simplify the complexity of these systems, I think we can drive the transformation down the line,” Heligman said.
“You can imagine it like a bioreactor generating electricity,” he added. precious steel valves; Replacing traps and other equipment with LEDs and cables should reduce costs significantly. Also, because the vessels do not need to withstand high temperatures and pressures, they can be made of cheaper materials like plastic for some applications.
The company is currently building a pilot bioreactor with a capacity of around 100 liters that can be sterilized using its technology. Heligman then said he was interested in exploring designs that could hold 40,000 to 80,000 liters.
Biosphere has raised $8.8 million in seed funding led by Lowercarbon Capital and VXI Capital, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. Participating investors are B37 Ventures; Caffeinated Capital, Includes Founders Fund and GS Futures.