Biointelligent sensor to measure viral activity: BioProS
A biointelligent sensor to advance digitalization in the production of cutting-edge therapeutics and create safe bioproduction processes.
Published on 29/07/2022 by Marlene Kopf, updated on 26/08/2022.
A biointelligent sensor to measure viral activity: introduction
Digitalization is becoming increasingly important for industries of all kinds and can also benefit virus production for vaccines.
In the medium term, it will cover the entire manufacturing chain from the beginning and take advantage of all the advances made in smart and batch manufacturing in recent years.
This will lead to a close linkage of technical, information, and biological systems, also known as biointelligent systems.
Next-generation therapeutics rely on a heterogeneous class of biological molecules ranging from viruses to whole genetically modified eukaryotic cells.
This puts immense pressure on developing the underlying production processes and requires new, sustainable, and resilient methods to produce these biological products.
Besides vaccine production, viruses are becoming increasingly important in other areas of the biopharmaceutical industry. The spectrum of therapeutic applications now also includes gene therapies or oncological diseases.
In this context, producing viruses and virus-like particles in cell culture for clinical use requires complex multi-step processes that highly demand product safety.
The production of the necessary viral vectors as starting material still involves many expensive and error-prone steps. Viruses are produced in complex bioproduction processes that must be optimized for each virus to make high-quality preparations.
Microfluidics for biointelligence, merging engineering, biology and information technology: project description
Digitalization of bioproduction processes can support the production of such high-quality products.
Biointelligent sensors are an excellent way to enable new quality control strategies.
The project BioProS, coordinated by Fraunhofer IPA, aims to develop a continuous, real-time biohybrid sensor technology that can be adapted to several specific analytes as a platform technology.
This way, the sensor system will be applied in different industries and production environments.
As part of the project, we developed a microfluidic flow control platform for the targeted supply of samples and reagents to the biointelligent sensor. We also developed a mini pump for cell culture.
Related content & results from this project
As a result of the Biopros project, the MIC developed the following packs and instruments:
- Mini pump for cell culture,
- PMMA device station,
- Thermoplastic molding packs,
- Polystyrene molding setup,
- Polycarbonate molding setup,
- COC molding setup.
In addition, we have published a review about materials and fabrication techniques of microfluidic chips.
Funding
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon research and innovation program under HORIZON-CL4-2021-DIGITAL-EMERGING-01-27, grant agreement no. 101070120 (BioProS).
Start date: 1 July 2022
End date: 30 June 2026
Overall budget: €6,317,756.25
