Why wouldn’t a company or university have their own pilot facility?
The Bioprocess Pilot Facility (BPF) is not a facility where industries can take a final step in turning ideas into commercial products and hence, profit. Instead, it is dedicated to the more fundamental research and development phase in between laboratory research phase and commercial implementation. The BPF aims to answer the following (technological) questions: How do bioprocesses and underlying fundamental principles tested on a laboratory scale behave on larger scales? What scale-up approaches give the best results? What aspects need to be investigated further before a bioprocess can be scaled up? To answer these questions, complex equipment and much expertise is needed, which is too expensive for any single company or university to finance on their own. This is why BE-Basic decided to develop a joint facility which is open for a variety of users who wish to carry out large scale experiments in a cost-effective manner.
