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Team:Cornell/Business
From 2011.igem.org
Project Description |
Future Directions |
Business Development |
Outreach/HP |
Safety
Business Cost Analysis
We have created a system in which products can be created continuously instead of in large batches. The following is an analysis of how our system matches up with current industrial standards.
Capital Expenditure
The batch production process has an advantage over our system in that it requires less capital and has a better economy of scale. Our system presents a linear economy of scale because we need to run chips in parallel to create more product. Batch production has a near-logarithmic economy of scale, since producing each extra unit of product costs less up to a reasonable point.
Operating Expenditure
Batch production has a lower cost of operation for relatively cheap bio-pharmaceuticals. However, operating cost can climb steeply if the yield is lowered or quality is important. For most expensive pharmaceuticals, a subset of the following factors generally will raise cost:
- Presence of side reactions, where resources are used to produce unwanted products instead of the target product.
- Toxic intermediates can often kill the host cell.
- Pharmaceuticals are created intracellularly. In order to extract the products, companies must lyse cells and purify the products. About 50% of the cost of creating intracellular pharmaceuticals is in the cost of purification. There are often 5-7 steps required in purification to remove all cell lysate, including organelles, other cell junk, other proteins, DNA, etc.
- Quality factors, such as pH, temperature, concentration, etc., must be tightly controlled.
- Different factor values are needed for different parts of the overall reaction. For example, if a pH of 5 is needed for the first step and then a pH of 8 is needed for the second step. Cells have a hard time with these reactions.
- Quality factors must be at a very specific value. Since mixing in a batch-processing is not perfect and the solution is not completely homogenized, and often you get different values (of concentration, pH, etc.) at different locations.
How our system solves the previously stated problems often found in batch processing:
- In the cell, a wide variety of enzymes often contain pathways for the creation of other products that reduce the yield of the target pharmaceutical. We avoid side reactions because our system only includes the enzymes for a single biochemical pathway.
- Once the microfluidic chip is coated, there will be no need for cells. Therefore, toxic intermediates in the biochemical pathway are not a factor.
- Purification of our system would be much cheaper than what is used in industry. On one hand, there will be some intermediates in our solution because we will not be able obtain 100% yield. On the other hand, our method still eliminates most steps in the purification process.
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- Our system allows us to have different quality factor values at each step, because each step occurs in a different microfluidic chip. For example, we can have different pH levels or temperatures on different chips. Therefore, this feature may enable our process to have a much higher yield than the batch process.
- Since we use only a small volume of reactions at a given time, we have a more homogenized solution and can control quality factors much more closely. In contrast, large batches require large volumes, making quality factors more difficult to control.
