Uppsala has long been recognised as a world-renowned biomanufacturing hub giving birth to a constant stream of associated companies. To secure future growth and bridge the gap between discovery and industrialisation the Testa Center was established in 2018 by the Swedish government and Cytiva. Located on Cytiva’s premises, the 2500 m2 facility has been an instant success used increasingly by Nordic start-ups across the whole field of biomanufacturing. 

 

“Bioprocessing companies often choose the established ways-of-working to lower the project risk as much as possible,” says Testa Center Director Jesper Hedberg, “Our mission at the Testa Center is to remove these barriers and we believe Testa Challenge is one way to do it. Inspired by concepts like Open Innovation, Hackathons, Co-working/Co-creation and Investor-pitching, we decided to mimic the innovation process in tech and digital industries and put it into a bioprocess context.” 

 

The actual challenge was for entrants to show how their product or service would improve a real-life start to finish bioprocess run in the Testa Center facility - producing and purifying a dAb domain antibody fragment. Entrants could concentrate on the whole process or any of the five key stages: 

 

• Production of dAb in E.coli in a single-use 50L bioreactor.

• Release of dAb to periplasm through heat treatment. 

• Clarification and concentration of dAb using cross flow filtration. 

• Purification of dAb using affinity and IEX chromatography. 

 

“The standard of entrants was incredibly high, not only from the Nordics but also internationally.  Eventually we narrowed down to the six finalists - ArgusEye, atSpiro, Freesense, IS-Instruments, Scitara and Unibap, adds Hedberg “During the Challenge week, we were impressed with all of them - their preparation, application and ingenuity when we had the inevitable issues to overcome.” 

 

“We are delighted to have taken part in the Testa 2020 Challenge. It offered us a unique opportunity to allow us to evaluate our sensor system in a complete bioprocess, from start to finish, and get valuable data and user-feedback from bioproduction experts. During the week we gained invaluable new knowledge and information that will support and contribute to our future development. We would highly recommend any start-up working in bioprocessing to consider entering next year,” says Erik Martinsson, CEO of ArgusEye 

 

The Testa Center’s aim is to repeat the Challenge in 2021 and attract more international entries.

 

For more information, please contact:

Jesper Hedberg,

Director Testa Center