AI-powered simulation software could help biomanufacturers understand the economics and sustainability of protein production at large scale.
The software, created by New Wave Biotech, is designed to help companies reduce their reliance on manual process modeling—to help prevent products failing as they’re moved from the lab to the commercial scale.
“There’s been a lot of cool innovation in the biomanufacturing space,” explains Oli Hall, CTO and co-founder of New Wave Biotech.
“But scaling up those innovations from a shake flask to a production facility can be very risky, and that’s the problem we’re trying to help solve.”
The technology works by suggesting potential sequences of unit operations that can be strung together as processes. The aim is to find those that work best together, while minimizing the complexity and costs of manual modeling and testing.
“One advantage of having a computational tool is you can search a huge [design] space,” explains Hall.
“On the downstream side of production, there might be a handful of unit operations that predominate, but due to the number of different permutations and parameter settings, the number of possible combinations is vast.”
Although the AI simulates some process dynamics, the focus is cost effectiveness and sustainability.
“We’re particularly useful for large scaleups where [those] cost reduction tools are the most useful,” Hall explains.
Other AI tools that customers can turn too might include, for example, Cytiva’s GoSilico™, for a deeper dive into chromatography modeling.
New Wave Biotech’s technology is currently focused on protein manufacturing for pharmaceutical and other industries. However, as Hall explains, the simulator is intended to be agnostic to the type of product being produced.
“There’s a lot of commonalities [between fermentation processes], with certain unit operations being the most cost-effective at scale,” Hall says.
Launched two years ago, the company is now offering the software live for sign up by early access customers working on protein-based products. They hope to offer it for other types of products at a later stage.
