Sunflower is committed to practical innovation at every stage of process development.
We view every contract research project as an opportunity to help your team explore the full potential of your protein product concept and consider the manufacturing process right from the start using Sunflower’s pioneering technologies.
The Perfect Host
We explore the benefits of alternative hosts to make your manufacturing process simpler and more cost-effective.
Fine-tuned Expression
We engineer yeast with markerless gene editing tools to make custom strains tuned for expressing your protein.
The Right Media
We find the cultivation media that is the right fit for your strain and product.
Perfusion Fermentation
We use Sunflower’s Petal™ Perfusion Bioreactor Systems to make you more protein with less effort than fed batch.
Scaling Up
We scale your perfusion fermentation processes effortlessly from Daisy Petal™ to Dahlia Petal™.
Simple Purification
We develop simple and scalable purification processes to save you time and money later.
Let us help you develop an efficient protein manufacturing process
We work with you to understand your product goals and develop a plan to quickly evaluate and optimize the manufacturability of multiple product candidates simultaneously. Using eukaryotic microbes to make your manufacturing process simpler and more cost-effective, we focus on quality and productivity up front to avoid unwanted surprises when it’s time to make lots of protein in the future. Our team has deep experience developing processes for the expression and purification of all kinds of proteins, such as cytokines, hormones, antibodies and antibody-like molecules, subunit antigens, enzymes, virus-like particles and recombinant dairy and meat proteins.
- Build strains fast. We use our own IP free strains, vectors and editing tools for expression of diverse heterologous proteins using Pichia pastoris.
- Design, build, test …repeat! Fast, parallel iteration in testing protein sequences and diverse strains to find the best way to produce your protein product.
- Feed me, I’m hungry. Cells need good healthy food, just like people. We have a variety of stock media formulations, all chemically defined, that are optimized for different protein classes. Or we can develop custom formulations specifically for you.
- Make it continuous(ly). We’ll show you the advantages of perfusion fermentation using our Petal™ Perfusion Bioreactor Systems. We can deploy your strains or ours–you choose.
- Make it better. We efficiently test key process parameters and collect meaningful data on a range of variables using our Daisy Petal™ Perfusion Bioreactor System. Why run nine reactors when you can get the same data by running just one?
- Simply your purification. We use straight-through chromatography to enable processes with the minimal number of steps needed for your application. This lowers buffer use and costs helping to make supervisors and Mother Nature happier!
- Product quality matters. We help you understand the quality of your protein at every stage of process development using industry standard tools and assays for biophysical characterization. We can also design and implement new analytical assays as needed. Quality is better than quantity, but let’s have both!
- Explore the benefits of using alternative hosts to produce your proteins with fewer process related contaminants.
- Test multiple versions of your protein product of interest to figure out which one will work best for future cost conscious manufacturing.
- Let us help you design your product based on our understanding of protein biophysical characteristics linked with manufacturability.
- Try chemically defined media formulations without compromising productivity or quality for your protein product.
- See how much better continuous fermentation can be compared to fed-batch fermentation.
- Perform fermentation DOE studies in the shortest possible time using continuous bioprocessing with our Petal™ Perfusion Bioreactor Systems.
- Get an understanding of future costs of goods by scaling perfusion processes from the Daisy Petal™ to the Dahlia Petal™ Bioreactor System.
Let us show you how you can produce more protein with less effort.
We’ll work with you to develop a custom research plan that’s right for your needs and resources.
“The technical expertise of the team at Sunflower has been vital for the development of our protein product. They clearly understand what works and what doesn’t, turning potential dead-ends into pathways forward.”