BIOINDUSTRY · R&D SERVICES

Fermentation process development

A fermentation that works in a shake flask and one that works in a hundred-litre fermenter are not the same process. Development is the work of closing that gap: medium, feed, induction and control turned into conditions that still hold at the scale you produce at.

Talk to us about your process

WHERE IT STARTS

Three different starting points

Fermentation development covers work that begins from very different places. Which one you are in decides the method, the timeline and what can honestly be promised.

You have an organism, not a process

The strain grows and makes the product, but nothing around it is defined: medium composition, feed strategy, oxygen demand, induction. The process is built around the organism — bacteria, yeast or fungi alike.

You have a process that stops at scale

Titre holds at the bench and falls in the fermenter. Oxygen transfer, mixing, heat removal and feed profile all behave differently as volume grows, and that is usually where the yield goes.

You have a process to transfer

It works, and now it has to move — to your own plant or to a contract manufacturer. Conditions, ranges and controls written down well enough that the result survives the move.

How a project runs

Three stages, each ending in a decision rather than a report. How long each takes depends on the complexity of the process — we size it after the first conversation, not before.

Stage one

Proof of concept

Does the organism produce under controlled conditions? First batch fermentations, a first medium, a titre measured with a method we trust. The output is a go or no-go, and when it is no-go we say so early rather than spend the budget finding out slowly.

Stage two

Optimisation

Medium composition explored by multifactorial design with surface response, induction systems and cell metabolism studied rather than assumed, batch and fed-batch compared, high-density cultivation with oxygen-enriched air where the process allows it. Critical parameters — temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, acid and base, feeding and induction — optimised against one analytical baseline.

Stage three

Industrialisation

Scale-up in fermenters, technology transfer, validation and standardisation of the process, and the two numbers a plant actually decides on: production yield and process cost.

What we measure

A process improvement is only worth what the analytics behind it can prove. These are the endpoints we report.

Titre and yield — product per litre and per unit of substrate, with the assay declared
Productivity — the same number against time, which is what the plant actually pays for
Substrate and feed consumption — how much goes in to get there, which is most of the variable cost
Oxygen demand and transfer — the parameter that most often decides whether a process scales at all

By-product profile — what else accumulates, because it is the downstream that pays for it
Reproducibility — the same conditions repeated, with the spread declared rather than the best run reported
Robustness — how far temperature, pH and dissolved oxygen can drift before the yield moves
Scale behaviour — what changes between flask, bench and a hundred litres, which is where most projects find their surprise

The laboratory behind it

Equipment

Fermentation	Applikon and Biostream fermenters, from shake flasks up to 100 litres (80 litres working volume), and up to 50 m³ with our manufacturing partners
Process control	Control and logging of temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, feeding and induction; oxygen-enriched air for high-density cultivation
Biomass recovery	Centrifugation and tangential flow filtration, down to a 0.22 µm cut
Analytics	Preparative HPLC, UPLC with diode array, fluorescence and refractive index detection, spectrophotometers and titrators

What you take away

Process	The fermentation process itself — medium, feed, induction and control conditions, with the ranges they hold in
Dossier	Data, conditions tested and results, in the form your technical file needs
Pilot batch	Production at scale when the project reaches that point

Start with the process

Tell us what the organism has to make, where the process stands today and the scale you are aiming at. We will tell you what the first stage would look like.