Cytiva welcomes Nucleus Biologics’ proven and powerful AI-powered interface that brings state-of-the-art cell media design and supply to the Cell and Gene Therapy Industry.

Cell and gene therapies are critically reliant on the growth and maintenance of a viable and efficacious cell population. It is proven that cell culture media can have a profound impact on both of these aspects and is thus a vital piece of supporting infrastructure of this rapidly expanding industry. As often happens during periods of sudden growth, the supporting infrastructure has lagged. Consequently, the vast majority of cell and gene therapy research and development relies on off-the-shelf cell culture media with formulations that are 5-10 years old.

The recently announced alliance between Nucleus Biologics and Cytiva aims to accelerate the development process and reduce regulatory hurdles for novel therapeutics, ultimately bringing new therapies to market in a shorter time.

State-of-the-Art Cell Culture Media

This new initiative from Nucleus Biologics and Cytiva will provide customers with access to state-of-the-art cell culture media, customized to their exact needs and based on the latest peer-reviewed publications. Cytiva customers can now eliminate the time lag between the latest research in cell culture media and its application in the design of optimized, high-performance cell culture media, bringing this critical support infrastructure up to date and giving every project the best possible chance of success.

Cytiva customers are now able to formulate their own custom cell culture media through Xuri™ Media AI Guide, based on Nucleus Biologics NB-AIR™ platform, and configure their media using Xuri™ Media Designer System, based on Nucleus Biologics NB-Lux™ platform.

Cytiva customers will be able to order their custom media in lot sizes ranging from 2 – 2000 L using the Xuri Media Designer System. This flexibility of lot size allows researchers to trial small quantities of media with several different formulations to fine-tune their selection. The final formulation can then be ordered in volumes required to support everything from early-stage research activities all the way through to commercialization. Using the Xuri AI Guide | Media Designer System, researchers retain full ownership of their formulations, an important advantage in an industry where media formulations have typically been the property of the media manufacturer, leaving the customer exposed to the risk of discontinuation of a product, reformulation of a product, and other supply chain risks.

Owning formulas and having access to a scalable custom media supply is a paradigm shift in cell therapy manufacturing and simplifies the development and commercialization processes.

NB-AIR: A Paradigm Shift in Cell Media Formulation

This leap forward in cell media formulation has only recently become a possibility due to advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The NB-AIR platform is the first of its kind, an entirely novel system designed specifically to create cell culture media for therapeutic applications. At its core, it is an extremely powerful novel neural network that facilitates machine learning. NB-AIR can remotely access and trawl through thousands of peer-reviewed publications relevant to cell culture, and intelligently collate all the information relevant to a specific cell type or application. Able to learn and discriminate between relevant information and noise, it presents the user with a set of recommended formulations based on the latest research data. NB-AIR enables users to make fully informed decisions based on up-to-date research when designing their cell culture media. The result is a dramatic improvement in media performance, giving the best possible chance of success in bringing a new therapeutic to market.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

The problem with designing optimized cell culture media based on the latest research is that the pool of data is too large. At the time of writing, there are over 490,000 peer-reviewed publications on T cells, and over 65,000 on mesenchymal stem cells, with no way of knowing a priori which few of these publications might contain insight that would aid in designing one’s cell media. This is the problem inherent in any large data set: there is simply too much data present to allow a detailed review; the information is there but remains out of reach.

NB-AIR solves this problem by intelligently parsing vast amounts of data, turning data into information, and information into knowledge, enabling researchers to pull out the few critical threads of knowledge from an otherwise impossibly large set of raw data. An insurmountable task made possible through the application of AI.

To learn more, click here to access NB Lux and NB-AIR. Watch the video below for a quick introduction.