Team:Jiangnan/Entrepreneurship
Overview
This project solves practical industrial problems and thus closely collaborates with industrial partners.
Jiangnan Team strategically collaborates with ‘Dabeinong Group’ on conducting this project including financial support and actively seeks guidance from Nanjing Suman Plasma Corporation on plasma device fabrication which is an important tool used in this project.
Strategic collaboration
with 'Dabeinong Group'
China is one of leading vaccine producers in the world. Having more than 45 vaccine manufacturers, it can produce 63 categories of vaccines that prevent 34 kinds of infectious diseases. However, relative low productivity and high production cost is still one of the key issues to be resolved in Chinese vaccine production industry. Therefore, we established a strategic relationship with Beijing ‘Dabeinong Group’, which is an agricultural high-tech enterprise committed to build modern agriculture including vaccine production in China with high technology. In this project, we are devoted to enable three features to our chassis cell line to make it feasible for the rapid production of a broad spectrum of animal vaccines. This project can not only help ‘Dabeinong’ surpass its peers in reducing vaccine production cost and complexity but also revolutionizing the entire vaccine production industry on cell line establishment technologies. Through this cooperation, we could also develop a better understanding on the industrial process of vaccine production and how synthetic biology can be used to solve some practical industrial problems
On 15th September, our team visited Beijing Daxing biomedical company which is a branch of “Dabeinong Group”. The purpose of this trip is to report our project progress and discuss unresolved problems and needs with expertise on the industrial part. Through a lively discussion and after an on-site visit, we became more clear on the practical significance of this project, received positive feedbacks and many insightful suggestions on unresolved issues and future directions.
To be specific on our project, we have 3 missions, i.e., broad spectrum, cell suspension and high titer,. We have fruitful discussions with ‘Dabeinong’ on each of these missions
Broad spectrum. Naturally, one cell line can be used to produce one or a few vaccines, and different types of cells need different cultivation technologies. In practice, if multiple types of vaccines need to be cultivated, it is technically complicated and non-economical. For example, during cell storage, a larger site is required to freeze different types of cells, and more manpower is required to resuscitate different types of cells at intervals. If the production cells were feasible for cultivating a large spectrum of viruses, these complicated procedures would be largely reduced, and the space and manpower required could be significantly reduced. Therefore, it may revolutionize the vaccine production field if we could obtain a self-owned intellectual property right cell line through synthetic biology approach, where all modified biobricks and cell functionalities are completely known. Through this visit, we are more clear on the production procedures of vaccines and thus the importance of enabling cells with this feature.
Cell suspension. Since cells used in vaccine production are traditionally adherent cells, the yield per volume is relatively small. Also, due to the artificial errors introduced during cell culture and inoculation when rotating bottle was used, quality control of each batch is relatively difficult. If suspension cells were used and rotating bottle was replaced by fermentation tank, fully automatic large scale production becomes possible Again, by on-site visiting to the production line, we gained in-depth understanding on the significance of our work and how this feature can help reduce vaccine production cost in practice. High titer. We used two approaches to enhance virus titer, i.e., genetically modulating cells using synthetic biology approaches and increasing virus titer using plasma devices. ‘Dabeinong’ offered us great help in offering us a new Canine Distemper Virus (CDV) line for virus titer test, which solved our problem that the current CDV under use could not infect MDBK cells. Besides, we have discussed with them possible solutions on establishing the suspension culture medium of MDBK cells, which is the current bottleneck in validating the functionalities of the identified suspension gene in MDBK cells. They gave us positive feedback as well as some other suggestions as backup plans.
Taken together, stepping out of the laboratory and into the enterprise helps us gain a new and more comprehensive understanding on vaccine production, and realized the practical importance of the three missions of our project and how synthetic biology can help solving industrial problems.
Jiangnan team will not stop after this iGEM competition, we will try to establish a technical platform for cell line construction using synthetic biology approaches, which can help more companies solve more cell based industrial problems. We believe that in the future we will have more power to impact the world with synthetic biology thinking and approaches.
Company visit(May 5th)
Since cold atmospheric plasma is used to increase virus titer in our experiments, it is crucial for us to learn how to setup such an apparatus. We contacted Nanjing Suman Plasma Corporation, which is one of the leading companies in the fabrication of plasma devices. We received lots of suggestions on the set-up, operation, safety use and other aspects of plasma equipment.
The technical staff of Suman has patiently explained us technical details of the configuration and fabrication process of plasma devices. He also gave us several suggestions on establishing our own plasma source. After this visit, we got much deeper understandings on the structure of plasma equipment and new ideas to solve the bottlenecks encountered in the experiment. We sincerely thank Nanjing Suman Plasma Company for their great support for our project.
