Biomanufacturing (cell based production) expanded enormously over last 20 years, nowadays making everything from food products, high value chemicals and medicines to biofuels and bioplastics. Opened possibilities lead to increase in demand, which lead to scaling up production and realisation how inefficient and expensive product recovery is at this industrial scales. Several EU Commission reports have stated that innovative cell harvesting technology is needed to enable bioeconomy revolution of our times.
uFraction8 offers a disruptive cell harvesting solution that reduces the costs of harvesting of cell based biomass by up to 75%, through direct reduction of energy usage and subsequent process cost reduction. This enabling technology opens new markets in lower value goods such as bulk feed and industrial chemicals, through lowering costs of their production and increasing producers’ margins by up to 50%, making those products economically viable.
Currently the market uses filters and centrifuges to perform primary harvesting of batches of cell cultures. On technology level, filters have tendency to clog before hitting high concentrations of cell, due to the limited porosity. Centrifuges accelerate both the media and cell culture to extreme conditions, using disproportional amounts of energy to perform a simple separation. In addition, deployment of industrial scale centrifuge requires strengthening of building foundations, which accounts for 60% of new centrifuge purchase. These technologies have seen small incremental advancements over the 150 years since first industrial adoption. uFraction8 offers microfluidics based technology to perform this harvesting process at a fraction of the cost of current technologies.
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