Koen Dierckx, CEO and co-founder of SimAbs, has worked in the antibody industry for about 20 years. He has seen a lot of batch reactors. And I am still amazed that this technology is still widely used,’ he explains. ‘Even though more efficient and sustainable platforms have been in development for years.’ Around 2019, Dierckx and four co-founders developed and patented one such platform: the Smart Integrated Manufacturing platform for Antibodies (SimAbs), as the company is also called. The crucial difference with these large batch reactors is that SimAbs, located on the UHasselt campus in Diepenbeek, works much smarter.

Soup

A bioreactor contains billions of cells that have been genetically modified to produce the desired antibodies. These cells then secrete the product into the ‘soup’ in which they float. This soup then needs to be purified using various chromatography and filtration techniques. ‘In a batch system, all this has to be done at once’, explains Dierckx. ‘We have more of a conveyor belt platform. We feed the cells continuously, while at the back the “soup” goes straight through the purification stage.’

‘We need much less nutrients and energy to keep things running’

According to Dierckx, the benefits are numerous. ‘First of all, there is the sustainability aspect; because our 500-litre production units are much smaller than a normal 10,000-litre batch reactor, they have a smaller CO₂ footprint [up to a quarter, according to calculations, ed]. This is possible because we need far less nutrients and energy to keep things running.’

This steady-state concept also improves the quality of the product, explains Dierckx. ‘In a batch process, the cells still have to grow, so the situation is different every moment. This can lead to high variability in the antibody product. With us, the cells always have a consistent environment, as long as we keep the rate of supply and removal of nutrients and product the same.’

The speed of the assembly line is determined by the type of cell and the antibody to be produced. ‘We can tailor production very precisely to the customer’s requirements’, says Dierckx. This also allows us to contribute to the production of personalised medicines, small quantities of tailor-made antibodies for a very specific group of patients.’

Flexible

SimAbs was founded in August 2019 by Dierckx and his colleagues Bart Van Acker, Joachim Vandeput and Tom Lokermans, and has since got off to a flying start thanks to subsidies from the Belgian government and private investors, despite the Covid pandemic. And although pharmaceutical companies were initially reluctant - this was, after all, a completely new way of producing antibodies - they were eventually won over. ‘I think mainly because of the flexibility of our technology. And because we are a small company, we can easily respond to our customers’ needs.’

For several years now, the team - which now numbers 10 - has been licensing its platform to pharmaceutical companies. But since this year, they also have a GMP facility in Hasselt that produces for customers. This amounts to 1 gram per litre per day. ‘We are mainly focusing on biosimilars, generics’, explains Dierckx. ‘This gives us the opportunity to show that our platform is a real improvement over batch reactors.’

‘As a small company, we can easily respond to our customers’ needs’

Affordable

According to Dierckx, the applications of the SimAbs platform are very broad. ‘From cancer treatment to anticoagulants and even new diabetes therapies.’ They recently received a follow-up grant to further improve the system. ‘We want to bring the quality controls that normally happen after the process directly into the production line. These are sensors that measure, for example, how much the produced antibodies clump together. You don’t want that in your product.’

In the future, Dierckx expects more and more bioprocessing companies to switch to assembly-line systems like SimAbs’, and he believes it is urgently needed. ‘At the moment, about 80 percent of the antibody market is in the northern hemisphere. That’s because the batch systems are simply not affordable in poorer parts of the world. As a result, antibody-based medicines are less accessible to patients in these areas. Our platform is cheaper, more sustainable and more efficient than current technology. And so it can be used all over the world. We hope to be able to make a contribution to this situation.’