Three-way consortium aims to optimize biologics development

Valitacell, Solentim and Microcoat have teamed up to advance in-line productivity assays to speed up biologics’ development with a €3.5 million grant.

In February, Irish biotech Valitacell partnered with biomanufacturing instruments firm Solentim to transform current workflows using a streamlined, automated platform to drive the earlier identification and accelerate development of biologic candidates.

The consortium will bring together Valitacell’s ValitaPIX technology with Solentim’s instrumentation to create a system enabling the automation of data-driven analysis and selection of top clones during the biologic drug manufacturing process. The technology involves a hardware component that enables precision sample preparation, on-board imaging and sample tracking of clones and cell samples.

Image: iStock/EtiAmmos

German diagnostics-focused biotech Microcoat Biotechnologie has now joined the consortium, and will provide proprietary coated plates, used to improve ranking and selection of top clones for manufacturing.

Methods to develop cell lines and processes have not changed over the past decade, the group say, but this project will “transform and simplify an extremely complex process.”

When asked how, Ian Taylor, chief commercial officer of Solentim told this publication “one can envisage saving considerable time in an overall CLD [cell line development] workflow by finding best clones earlier, you can make better early decisions, and take a much smaller number of clones forward.”

The project will take 24 months and has been funded through a €3.5 million ($4 million) grant from Fast Track to Innovation (FTI), part of the European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 program.