Protein Production Technology Podcast · FPG Media

Episode 35: From the Strain to Scale-up: How to Secure Scaling Up With a Biofoundry In Partnership with Beckman Coulter

·1 hr 3 min·4 clips

TWB says the Echo Access Station cut reaction costs about 20-fold and eliminated 2,000 tips.

The session opens with the problem of getting strain development ready for scale-up. It stays grounded in lab work instead of drifting into marketing language. The speaker describes a custom automated setup built for repeated testing and assembly. Echo sits at the center of that setup. The Echo 525 is presented as a liquid-handling tool that can dispense very small volumes and work with different liquid types, including solutions used for enzymes and water-based reactions. That flexibility makes it useful for assembling reactions built from promoters, genes, termination elements, and enzymes. The workflow is designed for comparison. Similar reactions can be placed in adjacent wells in 384-well plates, with small changes from one well to the next so teams can see which design improves the strain. That is a design-of-experiments approach, not a one-off bench test. The speaker emphasizes that lower reaction volumes reduce reagent use. Lower reagent use brings down cost. Lower cost makes it possible to run experiments that would otherwise be too expensive. The episode then shifts to a custom Echo Access Station created in 2022 with Beckman. That station was built to address a K-E discharge issue. It combines the Echo 525 with a dedicated arm that distributes microplates to the rest of the system. Those connected components handle unit operations after the Echo moves the plates on. The setup includes shaking, centrifuging, and PCR, and it also includes a microplate reader. The point is not the hardware list on its own. The point is the workflow that appears when the instruments can communicate and hand plates off reliably. In that arrangement, one system distributes and the others carry out the next step. The result is a more integrated screening station. The guest also explains why that matters in a screening campaign. If each reaction uses less material, the lab can do more experiments with the same budget. That makes the platform useful for iteration. It helps teams compare many variants quickly. It also helps move from exploratory strain design toward the practical demands of scaling manufacturing. The larger conversation keeps coming back to scale, cost, and execution. Its tone stays technical, measured, and industry-facing.

As heard by us

A practical look at how automation shapes cost, throughput, and workflow in alternative-protein lab work.

The episode focuses on the practical machinery of alternative-protein lab work, with attention on workflow instead of slogans. Its strongest line is the way automation turns into a cost problem: doing design-of-experiments work in 384-well plates, dispensing tiny volumes, and…

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When strain engineering has to become a scalable, cheaper workflow.

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