Projects Profile
Project Title
Development of an expert system for optimized cell culture growth and protein production
Partnership
Dr Roberto A Steiner, King’s College London
Dr. Hailin Yang, Jiangnan University
Project Aim
In this project King’s College London and Jiangnan University are collaborating to develop an expert system being able to fully supervise the cell growth process in fermentors/bioreactors. The expert system will be capable of performing automatic control, bioprocess management and the optimization of the process for biomass production. The software expert system will also be generic and can be incooperated into variety of biofermentors for fermentation process control and optimisation.
Inspiration for the projects
Fermentation plays a key role in numerous industry processes, e.g. food and drink production, biopharmaceutical manufacture, lifescience reagent and chemical productions. Despite of its wide usage, the technology are still largely a manual process and prorn to error, and can be very expensive to use, such as for protein production. In recent years bioreactor suppliers have been developing automation modules on their own bioreactor for the control of fermentation processes. However, the available control software systems are still relatively simple and lack of genericity and sophistication. Therefore more advanced algorithms and expert software system generically applicable to variety of fermentation bioreactors is still an urgent need to further improve fermentation process control and optimization.
To address this issue, the Jiangnan University has recently developed a novel expert software for generic fermentation process control and optimisation, which has gained good appreciations in food and drink industry. The current implementation software system constitutes a basic framework of an expert system for fermentation process control and optimisation. It is capable of acquiring, recording and retaining key process parameters as well as performing statistic analysis on them. At King’s College London, production of protein for biophysical investigation are performed routinely which are labour intensive and is an expensive fermentation processes, and developing an expert control system to optimise the fermentation production and to improve the protein yield are diseirable.
In this project research experts from Jiangnan University and King’s College London will establish a joint research team to develop an generic expert control software system to target on the high value end of the fermentation process optimization and control, i.e. protein production via fermentation processes, which will be significantly improve the fermentation process control and increase the product yield of the fermentation to bring down the cost.
Commercial Potential and Further Development
The project will produce commercial prototype software expert system for control and optimization of the expensive fermentation processes for protein production. The demonstration of the feasibility and the effectiveness of the software will be conducted and results evaluated. The process improvement by using the software system will be characterized against the more conventional way of control. The market potential, competitive advantages and the commercialization route will also be assessed.
The project could potentially open up new opportunities for various industry users for their fermentation process control and optimization of production yield, and to improve their product quality and reducing costs. The technology has attracted significant industry interests. Numerous companies in food and drink industry have already implemented their earlier expert system for food fermentation ingredients production.
