This story originally ran on May 20.
Finnish biotech firm BioSilta said this week that the KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm had adopted the company's newly developed EnBase Flo enzyme release media technology for use in secondary screening of poorly expressing proteins as part of the Swedish Human Protein Atlas project.
Use of EnBase Flo will increase the efficiency of the secondary screening process by allowing the KTH researchers to scale down from a shake-flask culture format to a 96-well microtiter plate format while retaining the same amount and quality of cell mass and recombinant protein production, BioSilta CEO Russell Golson told ProteoMonitor.
EnBase kits allow researchers to precisely regulate the release of nutrients to growing cultures, which, according to the company, allows for the production of up to 50 times more cells and 10 times more recombinant protein than traditional methods.
BioSilta has been working with KTH researchers since earlier this year, testing the technology for use in the Human Protein Atlas project, Golson said.
"KTH is quite a conservative group, and we had to go through more than two rounds to ensure that they were getting the quantitative and qualitative results that they were getting with their traditional methods," he said.
Golson declined to give a precise figure when asked the value of BioSilta's contract with KTH, but he characterized the contract as "significant."
"We're a small company, and this is the first customer who will be routinely using it in this type of screening environment," he said.