Innovative Non-invasive and Affordable Technology to Automate Monitoring of Cultures to Enhance Productivity and Accelerate Fermentation and Scale-up in Bioprocessing

生物细胞和微生物的培养在生产高价值治疗剂、疫苗、生物燃料以及食品和饮料产品的生物加工中至关重要。发酵过程的实时持续监测和进料对于优化、效率和再现性至关重要。培养容器要么配备有侵入式传感器，要么需要手动取样和进料方法来控制培养过程。这引入了污染风险，并且不允许在实验室外进行远程监控。此外，这种侵入性和劳动密集型的过程给劳动力带来负担，影响效率，增加成本，导致污染风险，并且由于消耗许多一次性塑料而不环保。实施创新的非侵入性和负担得起的监测和喂养设备，以远程和实时自动监测培养物，将消除侵入性和离线手动监测和喂养做法。这将有助于远程跟踪培养物，特别是在COVID-19情况或火灾警报等实验室访问限制期间，以提高生产率并降低成本。我们设想未来的培养容器监控和进料系统，利用最先进的工程生物学和光学传感技术，远程实时无缝控制培养过程。这将大大减少污染，提高精确发酵和扩大规模，以加速研发和研究突破。该项目将对优化生产产生巨大影响，并比以往任何时候都提高劳动力效率，重现性和准确性。我们的解决方案将减少实验室塑料废物，降低成本，最大限度地提高利润，创造显著的经济和环境影响。我们的业务为学生和毕业生提供就业机会，重点关注女性和少数民族，以支持当地经济，并提高生物技术行业的多样性和包容性。因此，这个雄心勃勃的项目为英国保持在生物技术创新的前沿提供了一个及时的机会。我们的颠覆性监测和进料技术将改变生物加工领域，推动医疗保健和工业生产。

Cultivation of biological cells and microorganisms is essential in bioprocessing for producing high-value therapeutics, vaccines, biofuel and food and beverage products. Constant monitoring and feeding of the fermentation process in real-time are essential for optimisation, efficiency, and reproducibility. Cultivation vessels are either equipped with invasive sensors or require manual samplings and feeding methods to keep the culturing process under control. This introduces a contamination risk and does not allow remote monitoring outside the lab. Moreover, this invasive and labour-intensive process burdens the workforce, affects efficiency, increases cost, leads to contamination risk and is not eco-friendly due to the consumption of many single-use plastics.Implementing an innovative non-invasive and affordable monitoring and feeding devices to automate the monitoring of cultures remotely and in real-time will eliminate the invasive and off-line manual monitoring and feeding practices. This will facilitate remote tracking of cultures, especially during lab access restrictions like the COVID-19 situation or fire alarms to increase productivity and decrease costs.We envisage future monitoring and feeding systems for culturing vessels to exploit state-of-the-art engineering biology and optical sensing technologies to seamlessly control the cultivation process remotely and in-real time. This will significantly decrease contamination enhancing precision fermentation and scale-up to accelerate R&D and research breakthroughs.This project will have a huge impact to optimise manufacturing, and enhancing workforce efficiency, reproducibility and accuracy than ever before. Our solutions will reduce lab plastic waste, decrease cost and maximise profit to create a significant economic and environmental impact.Our business offers job opportunities for students and graduates focusing on women and ethnic minorities to support the local economy and enhance diversity and inclusiveness in the biotech industry. This ambitious project thus provides a timely opportunity for the UK to remain at the forefront of innovations in biotechnology. Our disruptive monitoring and feeding technologies will transform the bioprocessing landscape to advance health care and industrial production.