BioCentury
ARTICLE | Tools & Techniques

Go small or go home

A portable manufacturing unit for single doses of biologics

August 18, 2016 7:00 AM UTC

A pair of MIT scientists has created a miniaturized, portable manufacturing system for producing multiple proteins at the same time and on a small scale, by marrying the team's recently developed microbioreactor with genetically engineered yeast. While the boldest applications such as mobile battlefield drug factories remain a future goal, the underlying biology could soon provide options for process development needs such as cell line optimization and continuous protein production.

Last month, Timothy Lu and Rajeev Ram from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a study in Nature Communicationsdescribing a system for perfusion-mediated, continuous culture of a yeast strain engineered to switch between production of two therapeutic proteins during a single incubation. ...