BioZone Biomanufacturing Facility

BioZone has infrastructure for pilot fermentation and biomanufacturing trials at 5 to 80 L scales. Services are available for the University of Toronto research community as well as external clients.

Humans have been making use of fermentation processes in food and drink preparation since ancient times. For 21st-century scientists and engineers, biomanufacturing offers the possibility of using well-defined cell lines and enzymatic processes to generate materials or chemicals of interest for research or commercial application.

Our facility is equipped to work with cell-free processes and organisms in the Biosafety Level 1 category (which includes common microbes such as SaccharomycesKomagataella, and Escherichia coli) suitable for piloting industrial processes and for protein expression in common hosts. For safety reasons, we cannot work with animal cell lines or pathogens.

Contact us for more information about BioZone Biomanufacturing services:

Please enter your name.
Please enter a valid email address.
Please type your message.

BioZone Biomanufacturing services

Consultation and setup

Our biomanufacturing staff work with researchers from academia and industry to assess existing small-scale processes and develop a protocol suitable for scale-up. Special attention is paid to research goals (growth curve determination, extracellular products, cell recovery, etc.) Costs depend on the nature of the experiment -- please contact us for more details.

Scale-up

BioZone's Biomanufacturing facility features water-jacketed fermentation reactors with capacities ranging from 5 L to 80 L (working volumes of approximately 3 L to 50 L). All reactors are equipped with pH, DO, and feed control, and are located close to spectrophotometers to measure growth.

Downstream processing

BioZone free-standing centrifuges can process up to 6 L of cell culture at a time. A suite of new downstream processing equipment, including semi-continuous centrifugation, cell disruption, ultrafiltration, and lyophilization will come online in mid-2025.