Valion Bio (NASDAQ: VBIO) and closely held LarmorBio today announced that Velocity Bioworks, Valion’s wholly owned biologics contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) subsidiary, has successfully completed an initial feasibility evaluation of LarmorBio’s BioScan-NMR platform less than six months after Valion secured exclusive rights to the NMR technology.
- • BioScan-NMR is being developed to create a new class of process analytical technology (PAT) for biologics manufacturing.
- The initial feasibility evaluation demonstrated that nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements have the potential to track microbial growth during a fermentation process.
- Building on that foundation, LarmorBio is developing a real-time, continuous monitoring platform designed to:
- Bring biological visibility directly into the manufacturing process, with the potential to detect deviations earlier
- Reduce the risk of batch failure
- Lower manufacturing costs
- Enable more consistent and efficient production
In a statement, Dean Zikria, interim CEO of Valion, commented, “Innovation and differentiation are increasingly important competitive advantages in the CDMO industry, and this milestone represents what we believe is meaningful progress in our strategy to bring new, clearly differentiated technology into our bioprocessing capabilities. We are particularly encouraged by this initial achievement and the potential for BioScan-NMR to further differentiate Velocity Bioworks.”
Initial Data Supports Continued Development
The initial feasibility evaluation captured a strong correlation between the signal measured by the BioScan-NMR platform and optical density at 600 nm or OD600, a widely used biological measurement for estimating cell density in liquid cultures, providing an encouraging early signal that the BioScan-NMR platform has the potential to capture information associated with microbial growth.
Mr. Zikria added, “While this project remains an early-stage proof-of-concept, the initial results are encouraging. We believe BioScan-NMR has the potential to provide greater visibility into fermentation processes, including information related to the media composition, fermenter environment, process conditions, and potentially product-related attributes – without relying solely on routine invasive sampling and sample processing. We look forward to the full implementation of this unique PAT system at Velocity Bioworks.”
Microbial fermentation can offer important advantages over mammalian cell culture for certain biologics and smaller-molecule production processes, including potentially faster production cycles, lower operating costs, and suitability for high-throughput or specialized manufacturing applications. However, effective process monitoring remains critical to maintaining consistency, optimizing yields, and identifying changes in a fermentation process.
Today, microbial fermentation is commonly monitored using indirect indicators of metabolic activity, including glucose, pH, and dissolved oxygen. While these measurements furnish important information about process conditions and cellular growth, they do not necessarily provide a direct view of cell health or other underlying biological changes.
LarmorBio’s next-generation BioScan-NMR technology platform is being designed for its potential to address monitoring gaps through closed-system measurements that could reduce reliance on routine offline sampling. By reducing or potentially eliminating the need for repeated invasive sampling, the technology could help preserve the sterile barrier while enabling real-time, continuous, and non-invasive visibility into key biological parameters.
“The potential to move beyond episodic sampling toward continuous process visibility is particularly compelling from a CDMO perspective,” Mr. Zikria concluded. “If subsequent development work confirms that BioScan-NMR can reliably monitor additional critical process attributes in a closed system, it could become an important enabling technology for more data-rich, responsive, and efficient bioprocessing.”
Velocity Bioworks intends to use the results of the initial feasibility evaluation to inform subsequent development activities, including assessment of the closed-system and continuous monitoring capabilities.
