A company using artificial intelligence to develop bespoke cell cultures says that it has the potential to slash manufacturing times.
Tolemy Bio claims that their machine learning algorithms can shorten the times to develop cell cultures from 12 months to six weeks or less.
“If you use a Google maps analogy,” explains Alex Ward, PhD, co-founder of Tolemy Bio. “Then we’re bypassing bottlenecks in the route to cell growth by manipulating metabolic processes by designing a tailored culture media.”
Ward spoke about the new technology at a “Dragon’s Den” session at the 21st Annual bioProcessUK Conference last year.
According to Caelan Anderson, PhD, co-founder of Tolemy Bio, traditional approaches to developing cell cultures rely upon ‘brute force’ techniques or the intuition of individual process developers.
However, these approaches can be too time-consuming for the new generation of cell and gene therapies.
In contrast, the founders of Tolemy say that AI reduces the time taken to develop a cell culture media by developing an understanding of the underlying biology.
“We call it a map of cellular metabolism,” explains Anderson. “We find out where people’s cells are, metabolically speaking, and then decide where we want to go on the map and route a path through.”
According to Ward, the Tolemy approach is more detailed than other computational approaches to developing cell culture media.
“A problem-solving suite of tools exist, which allow you to build rudimentary maps, but they only give a high-level view of metabolism,” he says.
“It’s like a paper map that gives you a rough outline—it covers what’s flat and mountainous on the terrain, but it’s a simplistic picture.”
In contrast, the team says their AI includes signaling, cytokine production, and the role of micro-nutrients and trace elements, which—although appearing in “almost homeopathic” amounts in culture media, can nonetheless affect a cell.
“It’s almost like we’re fine-tuning circuits by manipulating the cells,” Ward explains.
The team is already working with customers to create plans and build datasets, as well as manufacturing the eventual cell culture media itself.
“With customers in cell and gene therapy, they’re thinking on a big timescale and conscious of regulatory hurdles, so we need to go with our customers on their entire journey,” says Anderson.
Once customers provide Tolemy with data about their characteristics of their process, Ward and Anderson say manufacturing and delivering a custom media can take as little as four weeks.
