Breaking new ground..
Cologne, 8 March 2023 – Ningaloo today announced that the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Change (BMWK) will provide substantial funding for a collaboration with the research group of Prof. Dagmar Wachten from the Institute of Innate Immunity at the University of Bonn for the next 3 years.
“Not only does this funding confirm that our approach of using optogenetic and electronic tools to break completely new ground in the production of NextGen biotherapeutics is perceived as promising. It also provides the basis to rapidly bring both our cell biological and device-based solutions to production readiness and then to market,” said Dr. Hanns-Martin Schmidt, co-founder of Ningaloo Biosystems and responsible R&D project leader.
“We think that the combination of our targeted bio-digital approach to cell culture control, coupled with the ever-growing possibilities of artificial intelligence, will in turn enable cybernetic control loops that will allow more complex biotherapeutics such as gene therapy vectors or multispecific antibodies to be produced in profitable quantities”, the molecular biologist elaborated.
..with a new endeavor
“I am really happy that the funding agencies see the potential of our collaboration and I am looking forward to this new endeavor“, says Prof. Dr. Dagmar Wachten.
“Beyond developing first solutions for biopharmaceutical process development, our vision of multi-channel controlled bioproduction is to enable all phases of upscaling in real-time controlled bioproduction,” added Dr. Herbert Müller-Hartmann, co-founder of Ningaloo GmbH.
Within the ZIM cooperation project titled “BIO-DIGIS”, R&D activities to develop optogenetic process control systems for biopharmaceutical production are funded at Ningaloo Biosystems and the University of Bonn.