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Excellence in innovation

Multifermenter: a fully automated, high throughput cultivation platform for microbial strain and process development

Excellence in innovation

As genetic engineering and molecular biotechnology progress, more and more genetic elements emerge that can improve production strain performance. By combining them, more production strain candidates can be created. Just one target product can demand hundreds or thousands of feasible cultivations – far more than the steel stirred tank bioreactors used to date can handle.

Boehringer Ingelheim’s answer to this is the Multifermenter system: a fully-automated, high-throughput early-stage microbial cultivation platform.

Integrated automation, integrated data

Developed in-house and custom-built at our Regional Centre Vienna, RCV, the Multifermenter is based on 2mag bioreactor blocks and integrated into an automated microbial process chain including downstream processing and process analytics, ensuring at-line sample processing. It also features full database embedding, allowing fast handling of vast amounts of data and speeding up development.

The Multifermenter’s design offers fine independent control of each vessel, but is also optimized for automation; thanks to the system’s highly robotized architecture, it automatically handles:

  • pH and DO sensor calibration
  • Inoculation
  • Batch, feed and induction phases
  • OD and titer sampling
  • Frozen sample storage
  • Complete data transfer
  • End of cultivation

Rapid results

The result is an output of up to 96 cultivations per week, with manual work reduced to setup and follow-up, allowing more time for experiment planning and data analysis.

Proven and trustworthy

Already proven in use, the Multifermenter dovetails with high-throughput downstream processing and analytics to create a powerful tool for developing and optimizing microbial production processes.

It’s one more reason why Boehringer Ingelheim BioXcellence™ is a trusted partner in innovative development.

For more information, please read the full whitepaper here.