CellScrew: a Plant-Based Cell Culture System for Efficient Adherent Cell Manufacturing

0:15 

Hello and welcome to another interview for Oxford Global. 

 
0:23 
Today. 

 
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I have the pleasure of being joined by Kai Nessman, Head of Business Development at Green Elephant Biotech. 

 
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He'll be joining us at our Cell 2025 conference later this year in November. 

 
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And Green Elephant will be joining us in the startup zone where they will pitch ‘Green to Scale: Plant Based Polymer for Efficient Adherence Cell Manufacturing From Small to Large Scale’. 

 
0:47 
Kai, thanks so much for joining me today. 

 
0:50 
Hello, very welcome to be here. 

 
0:51 
Thanks. 

 
0:53 
Great. 

 
0:53 
So to begin, can you briefly introduce Green Elephant Biotech and the key problem that you set out to solve in the life sciences industry? 

 
1:02 
Yeah, absolutely. 

 
1:03 
Of course. 

 
1:04 
Green Elephant Biotech is a company located in the middle of Germany. 

 
1:10 
It is still pretty young, a startup founded in 2021. 

 
1:14 
We are about 20 people now and we are addressing the key manufacturing hurdles and challenges that we see in the cell and gene therapeutic market, especially in the and expansion of adherent cell cultures in a large scale. 

 
1:36 
And here we are predominantly addressing the key pain points that we still see in the on the manufacturing side and in the implementation of these new drug modalities in the market. 

 
1:52 
It is still a very manual manufacturing process that is still very often on small scale connected to a lot of manual handling needs here. 

 
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Here we really try to make the cultivation more efficient, more effective, more simple and also less error prone by reducing footprint and handling time. 

 
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And by this, of course, directly also reducing the cost of goods, the risk of secondary contamination and due to excellent scaling opportunities, also dramatically reducing the time to market. 

 
2:32 
Fantastic. Thanks, Kai. So, I just wanted to ask about your flagship product called the CellScrew. It's a novel approach to adherent cell cultivation. How does this, how did you come up with this concept? And what gap in the market were you trying to address with it? 

 
2:48 
Yeah, indeed. 

 
2:50 
The CellScrew is a flask that basically from the outside looks like a roller bottle, like a standard roller bottle. 

 
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The magic actually happens when you look into the inner architecture because there is what you can find on the one hand several concentric cylinders that are positioned one after each other, but also an Archimedean screw. 

 
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And if you are asking how this how our founder, it was Joel Eichmann came up with this concept. 

 
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Actually he was at a water playground and trying to use these Archimedean screws and by this pumping up the liquids from the bottom up to a higher level. 

 
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And then he directly thought back to the cell culture needs and to design cell culture flasks more efficiently. 

 
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And exactly this, Archimedean screw is what you can also find in the CellScrew in the roller bottle device by transporting. 

 
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You can also see this here by transporting the cell culture medium from the bottom of the flask all the way up to the top, reaching the central cylinder within the flask. 

 
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It runs all the way back again to the bottom and is transported up. 

 
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And now this is guaranteeing and maximising ideal and optimised oxygenation, but also mixing capabilities as you would be in a stirred bioreactor. 

 
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But you're really avoiding the shear forces. 

 
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And due to the amount of concentric cylinders, we also have a very high surface to volume ratio. 

 
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So the efficient or that makes the cultivation mode much more efficient and effective compared to the standard and static devices that we have in the market. 

 
5:00 
That's great and thanks very much for the demonstration there. 

 
5:04 
I wanted to talk briefly about sustainability because obviously this is a huge topic in the area and it's one of your key value propositions. What does sustainable bio processing mean to a Green Elephant Biotech and how is it reflected in your product design and your operations? 

 
5:23 
Yeah, this is indeed one of the key elements that we are also addressing here as one important needs. 

 
5:30 
Of course also the sales crew is a single use technology consumable. 

 
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So for a it is pre sterilised or the pretreated and meant for single use and then discarded after usage. 

 
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And this is of course a development that we have seen in the last couple of years in the market and that contributes a lot to increased patient safety. 

 
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Nobody of us really wants to go back from this very useful and very safe single use technology development. 

 
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However, normally the plastics that are used for these single use consumables are made out of fossil plastics, fossil polymers like polystyrene for example. 

 
6:20 
We are using an fully plant based polymer called the polylactic acid and this is completely based on cornstarch. 

 
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The corn is grown by the farmer, the starch is then harvested, fermented into lactic acid, then industry in the industry a polymerase to polylactic acid PLA, and this PLA is then 3D printed into the sales group and after incineration, which can be directly used or added to the standard lab and manufacturing garbage. 

 
6:59 
After incineration, only the amount of carbon is released into the atmosphere that was bound before by corn. 

 
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So we are talking about a renewable carbon cycle here. 

 
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And if we are now taking all of the energy consumptions into consideration, including shipment, manufacturing, delivery, things like this, we are still seeing a very significant reduction of carbon footprint of 90% compared to the standard multi tray stacks. 

 
7:36 
That's fantastic and really interesting to hear about your sustainable technology. 

 
7:43 
Could you talk maybe briefly about how this compares to traditional single use systems in terms of performance and also environmental impact, which you touched on earlier? 

5:53 
right, the environmental impact as I said, about 90% reduction in terms of performance. 

 
8:04 
So we are really meant to scale here. 

 
8:08 
The device, the smallest device is what you can see here, the CellScrew mini, only a little bit larger than a Coca-Cola can. 

 
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And this already provides a surface area of 850 square centimetre. 

 
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This already replaces 12T flasks of the size T-75, and the large flask that CellScrew 10K that I just presented you earlier has a the same the identical inner architecture, but already providing a surface area of 10,000 square centimetre. 

 
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So here if you still want to do the math back into T-75 flask, replacing 133 T flasks. 

 
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And that is not only a matter of footprint reduction and designing your cultivation more effective, but especially also a reduction of handling time. 

 
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Because due to the central cylinder, you have the possibility to access and to treat and to handle the entire cell culture with one step with a zoological pipette. 

 
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For example, in compared to 12 times in parallel or even 133 times in parallel. 

 
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So reduced handing time and connected to this of course significantly reduced risk of secondary contamination. 

 
9:36 
That's really impressive. 

 
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So if we talk about how this is actually going to be used in the industry, what kind of modalities and applications Green Elephant currently targeting with this product, Yeah, it is really positioned in the heart of the cell therapy cell and gene therapy space here any cell line that grows adherent would be in scope and can be cultivated in the cells core. 

 
10:11 
The cells core as I said, comes TC treated already. 

 
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It can also be coated if this is necessary with laminine or any other extracellular matrix molecule that is appropriate. 

 
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So the cultivation of IPS CS for example, is possible and in scope within the cells crew. 

 
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This also has been tested by Mitani, for example, who coupled the cells who with a preconfigured tubing head to their Prodigy instrument for further cultivation and differentiating them afterwards into cardiomyocytes or also hepatosytes or other cell types. 

 
10:56 
The cultivation of MSCS is also in scope either for direct cell therapeutical usage or also for the manufacturing of E VS or exosomes, but also heck cultivation, heck 293 also here for the manufacturing, for example for of AAB or lentiviruses for gene therapeutical use would be in scope here, just to name a couple. 

 
11:24 
Fantastic. 

 
11:25 
So what does the next stage of growth look like for green elephant biotech? 

 
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Are you focused on scaling production or expanding geographically, diversifying the product line? 

 
11:36 
What are your thoughts on this? 

 
11:39 
Yeah, actually a little bit of everything. 

 
11:41 
Yes, we are, as I said, still being here a small German company. 

 
11:47 
We are at the moment here focused on our target Central European or European market. 

 
11:53 
But indeed, yes, we are also approaching the North American market, but also the Asian market in near future and more in terms of portfolio offering together with our investment partner Burkhart to develop our automated platform, the Archie Medias. 

 
12:18 
That is a little bench top automated handling system where you are able to position the only slightly adapted cells through 10K at the bottom part. 

 
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In the top part, you are able to place all needed raw material of cell, cultural media, washing buffer, cytokines, anything that is needed here. 

 
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Of course also your cell, your cells, you equip the Archimedes platform, you it is fully integrated and aseptically connected. 

 
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You close the doors and then everything in there is handled hands free and fully automated, including the seeding, expansion and harvest, but also a online monitoring and also active controlling then of pH, temperature, CO2O2, but also active metabolite measurement of at least glucose and lactate. 

 
13:16 
Also fat badge or perfusion mode. 

 
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Everything can be pre installed in this instrument. 

 
13:24 
Great. 

 
13:24 
So with that in mind, like looking three to five years ahead, how do you see your company impacting the broader field of biomanufacturing and cell therapy production? 

 
13:37 
Well, I think if you're remembering back to the very first question, how we position ourselves and what market needs we are in particular addressing. 

 
13:49 
I think we really come up here with a very high innovation of solving actually different problem problems. 

 
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On the one hand, the scalability to really make the cell and gene therapeutics manufacturable in a cost efficient way in a risk reduced way and with this of course also within a reduced time to market, but also for lower costs at the end for the patients. 

 
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This is something that we are significantly addressing with the architecture of the sales group and this high efficiency factor that we are connecting to this. 

 
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Then really to automate it and have your full GMP compliance of this automated system and the full supply chain. 

 
14:39 
Here is I think the second step that really pays into also keeping the skill set and the scientific background of the lab operators to a really lower level that is sufficient to also run this Archimedes platform. 

 
14:59 
And of course, last but not least, the topic of sustainability. 

 
15:03 
Here we are really not only reducing the fossil material, but we are reducing and replacing the material by a fully plant based polymer to really significantly here reduce the carbon footprint which is extremely important for the future growth of whole Pharmaceutical industry, right. 

 
15:28 
So you'll be at Cell UK 2025 and you'll be in the start up zone. 

 
15:33 
So you'll be pitching to our attendees at the start up zone. 

 
15:41 
Could you give me a maybe one to two-minute elevator pitch for why green Elephant biotech? 

 
15:49 
Yeah, absolutely. 

 
15:51 
So the first thing maybe is the green elephant itself. 

 
15:56 
We are really here to make the large industry green, the large elephants in our industry, in our Pharmaceutical industry green and this by a pure simplicity. 

 
16:10 
It is a high innovation within the sales crew, but it still remains simple by increasing the efficiency, the surface to volume ratio, the efficiency of Ethereum cell cultivation and connecting this to a very easy to handle automated and this even GMP compliant capabilities. 

 
16:31 
This is really dramatically reducing the complexity of your process development enables you for cheaper and risk reduced manufacturing and this with a lot less space and handling time. 

 
16:46 
I think this is really the heart here of our innovation of the sales group. 

 
16:54 
That's fantastic. 

 
16:55 
So Kai will be joining us once again at the Cell 2025 conference, which will be later this year in November, Hammersmith, London. 

 
17:06 
So if you want to learn more about Greener Elephant Biotech, make sure you stop by and say hello. 

 
17:14 
But without any further ado, thank you very much Kai for joining me today and best of luck with your future. 

 
17:22 
Thank you very much and thanks again for the very kind invite. 

 
17:25 
That's very nice. 

 
17:29 
Great. 

 
17:29 
Fantastic. 

 
17:31 
Thanks very much once again, Kai. 

 
17:33 
Now we're finished with the interview. 

 
17:36 
How did you find that? 

 
17:39 
I'm very sorry that I caught the last question. 

 
17:43 
That's OK. 

 
17:46 
I think we.