Innovative Raman-Sensor-Technologie zur beschleunigten Entwicklung von Bioprozessen

With the ongoing climate change and the coronavirus pandemic, it has become increasingly clear that the development of bioprocesses must proceed at a rapid pace in the future. Losses in time and quality due to the use of traditional analytical methods must be avoided.
Nevertheless, time-consuming analytical activities are still carried out in bioprocess development today, taking up a large part of working hours. These include training staff in new analytical methods, developing complex methods (e.g. enzyme assays), error-prone sampling (even outside normal working hours), sample preparation (e.g., sterile filtration of samples, dilution steps), calibration of measuring instruments (e.g., determination of optical density), and downstream analyses using various measurement techniques (e.g., HPLC and GC) .

The project participants share the vision of making most of these time-consuming activities obsolete in the future by using Raman spectrometry, an online measurement technique with a high information content, in addition to existing online parameters (pH, temperature, pressure, dissolved oxygen, exhaust air signals). This technology can measure many relevant concentrations with high temporal resolution during the ongoing process.

The overarching goal of the planned project is to bring together experts from various scientific and industrial disciplines to enable the “rapid” development of entire bioprocesses using a single high-resolution measurement technique, Raman spectroscopy.