Selected category: Biotechnology

Transitioning from the world’s current petroleum-based industry to a sustainable bioeconomy depends upon the microbial upcycling of plant-based feedstocks for monomer production. Researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) in Germany have introduced automation platforms to enable the rapid engineering of microbial strains that can convert renewable raw materials into value-added compounds.

Automation offers many benefits for bioprocess development involving multiple microbial strains, yet few off-the-shelf platforms are capable of combining liquid handling tasks with microscale cultivation. The Microbial Bioprocess Lab at Forschungszentrum Jülich needed a customized platform to support its research, and turned to the Tecan Integration Group for a solution that has improved its microbial cultivation workflows.

Tessa Therapeutics has developed a virus-specific T cell therapy for the treatment of solid tumors, which has shown promising results in early trials. Stringent quality control, including time-resolved fluorescence cytotoxicity assays performed on a multimode reader, is essential for this work.