Manufacturing vaccines and other biopharmaceuticals can be challenging. These medical products are made from living organisms or their components, and are often produced using living cells hosted in bioreactors.
Once the cells in the bioreactor have produced the micromolecules needed, the relevant parts have to be separated from the other cell parts. Purification and separation techniques using physical filters and specialised materials help to tease the necessary parts out, and the final steps involve stabilising the product.
This type of manufacturing is complex and requires constant monitoring and stringent controls. Conditions have to be kept within specific parameter limits throughout the pipeline for effective and safe biopharmaceutical and vaccine development.
To help optimise these processes effectively, the Inno4Vac project developed an online platform, called CADET-Hub. This unified open-source platform employs modelling tools to enable researchers and engineers to collaboratively design, analyse and improve biomanufacturing processes.
“This will help to accelerate process development and optimisation while minimising experimental workload and costs, for research and industry alike,” says Reinhard Liebers, project manager at the European Vaccine Initiative, which coordinated Inno4Vac.
The CADET-Hub platform enables researchers to simulate manufacturing processes from beginning to end, ensuring that bioreactor conditions, centrifugation, filtration and chromatography processes can be fine-tuned, and that the products are stable once they reach the end of the pipeline. A case study run by Inno4Vac using model-based optimisation in CADET-Hub showed that the tool could achieve a 50% improvement in upstream yield and a 20% improvement in downstream productivity.
The platform will also integrate Bayesian and advanced kinetic modelling approaches that were developed as part of Inno4Vac to predict vaccine stability when exposed to a variety of changing conditions.
Each of the modules is integrated into a browser-based JupyterHub, eliminating the need for sophisticated software installation thereby lowering the barriers to uptake, and they are open-source, contributing to open and accessible science.
CADET-Hub will help to streamline and accelerate production processes for vaccines and other bioproducts, lowering costs and increasing efficiencies. Most importantly, it will mean that future vaccines that may be needed rapidly to combat pandemics can be produced quicker.
Inno4Vac is supported by the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a partnership between the European Union and the European pharmaceutical industry.