Erbi Biosystems, Inc.

Through microfluidic technology and integration, we at Erbi Biosystems have miniaturized large scale bioreactors to the milliliter scale. This technology enables control and parallelization, as well as greatly reducing the labor and space required by systems with traditional culturing systems. Such integration and parallelization enables experiments which would otherwise seem intractable, such as full metabolic analysis of organisms using parallelized continuous culture. Continuous culture is typically performed in stirred tank bioreactors ranging from 100 ml to liters in scale. As typical experiments run for tens to hundreds of cell doubling cycles, typical continuous culture campaigns require tens to hundreds of liters of sterile media. Such experiments are therefore labor intensive, and can be considered tedious and nearly intractable tasks. At Erbi Biosystems, by reducing the reactor volume to 2 milliliter, the same experiments can now be performed with minimal media volume, faster setup times (minutes instead of hours), less space, and in parallel with minimal overhead.