Scientific Bioprocessing enters long-term strategic partnership with PyroScience

Scientific Bioprocessing (sbi) has entered into a long-term strategic partnership with PyroScience, a manufacturer of optical pH and oxygen sensor technology.

Under a 10-year agreement, sbi and PyroScience will bring together its decades of expertise and technologies and join forces to develop a new approach to bioprocess monitoring and control. The first generation of products from the partnership focuses on bioprocessing in shake flasks and is expected to be available to the market in the beginning of 2024.

"We are very excited about this strategic partnership with PyroScience," commented Daniel Grünes, sbi's President & CEO. “Due to sbi’s strong footprint in microbial bioprocessing, we know that our customers are desperately looking for fermentation vessels with bioreactor-like capabilities but with the simplicity, throughput, OPEX, and CAPEX of shake flasks."

For some time, sbi has been working to realize the vision of smart shake flasks with its biomass monitoring and feeding technologies as well as the DOTS Software platform. "The next obvious platform extensions are easy-to-use pH and dissolved oxygen (DO) optical sensors enabling classical bioreactor applications like DO-based feeding or pH control in shake flasks for the first time," added Konrad Herzog, VP of Research at sbi.

sbi will introduce the completely new concept of chemosensor pills to overcome the disadvantages of current spot-based sensing technologies that have not penetrated the shake flask market despite being around for decades. "Chemosensor pills look like medicine but instead of a pharmaceutical compound, they contain dyes for sensing pH and DO as well as other analytes," Herzog added. "You just drop them into your flasks and shake them with the culture. Whenever the pills pass our externally attached optical multiparameter sensor, their signal and identity are determined non-invasively through the glass wall together with other parameters such as spectrally resolved biomass and fluorescence. This is how we envision the future for chemosensors in bioprocessing, from pH and DO to glucose and metabolites."

"We have been looking for the right strategic partner to expand our strong pH and DO sensing portfolio, covering applications from deep-sea and lab research to space exploration, towards the fast-growing bioprocessing market," said PyroScience’s CEO & Co-founder, Dr Roland Thar. "Joining forces with sbi represents a clear win-win for us. PyroScience will contribute years of experience, know-how and technologies in pH and DO chemosensing to sbi’s promising bioprocessing DOTS platform, while profiting from sbi’s application knowledge and global presence in the bioprocessing market.”