Ask any scientist who has worked with cell culture in the lab: contamination is high on their list of fears. Even a stray bacterial or fungal spore can ruin an entire test.
Now imagine scaling up to that risk Organic productionwhich uses living cells to make a variety of things, including medicines, food ingredients and industrial materials. There, contamination not only hinders productivity, it has the potential to harm the public, for example, if bad microbes get into pharmaceuticals.
Not wanting to take any chances, companies took a scorched earth approach to combating contaminants, blasting their equipment with hot steam. But this is an expensive technique: generating steam requires a lot of energy, and the equipment must be hardened against high temperatures and pressures during sterilization.
“It was a method developed by Pfizer in the '40s to make penicillin,” Brian Heligman, co-founder and CEO. biosphereTechCrunch said. “And you look at the core systems, they look just like they do today.”
Steam is not the only way to sterilize equipment. Another is to grow cells in a single-use reactor, which is wasteful. Ultraviolet (UV) light is another. Yet until recently, generating enough UV-C light, which is necessary for decontamination, was expensive. Now, thanks in part to COVID, they're much cheaper.
“In the Covid era, you've seen a lot of capital flow into making UV-C LEDs,” Heligman said. “They will probably get orders for lower prices in the next decade.”
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 furnace, four bright LEDs illuminate each part of the chamber and its materials. The startup is now testing eight of them as part of a $1.5 million defense deal project To explore ways of using biomanufacturing to produce high-performance oils.
Using LEDs has the potential to lower the cost of organic production, allowing such processes to produce materials that would previously have been too expensive.
“When you start to be able to simplify the complexity of these systems, we think we can push a transformational bottom line,” Heligman said.
“You can think of it like the electrification of a bioreactor,” he says, adding that replacing expensive stainless steel valves, traps and other equipment with LEDs and a cable will help cut costs significantly. What's more, because the vessels don't have to withstand high temperatures and pressures, they can be made of cheaper materials like plastics for specific applications.
The company is currently working to build a pilot bioreactor that can hold about 100 liters and can be sterilized using its technology. After that, Heligman said he's interested in exploring designs that would be able to 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 exclusively told TechCrunch. Participating investors include B37 Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, Founders Fund and GS Futures.