Spheres4Life, a biomedical startup based in Enschede, is collaborating with SBMC on a feasibility study to validate the safety of S4, a special cell culture medium used in biomedical research. If the medium passes this safety test, the company will be able to start sales activities in the Netherlands.
“S4 has an ingredient that stops mycoplasma infections, which are common in biomedical research labs’, says Jeffrey Stolwijk, Co-Founder and CTO of Spheres4Life B.V.. “Mycoplasma is hard to spot with a regular microscope and needs special tools to detect. It messes up cell experiments and makes the results useless. There are products that can kill mycoplasma, but it’s better to prevent infections with mycoplasma in the first place.”
‘S4 prevents mycoplasma messing up cell experiments.’
“In our previous work, we found that S4 works well at killing mycoplasma in a specific concentration range, without harming certain cell types. We plan to confirm its safety on other cell types, which are commonly used in the biomanufacturing industry. This will give us the confidence to move on to the next phase of selling S4. We are delighted to collaborate with SBMC on this.”
Co-finance
Jan Rietsema, CEO of Smart Biomaterials Consortium: We are very happy that we can assist Spheres4Life in bringing a product to the market that can further enhance the reliability of cell-based biomedical research. The validation experiments will be conducted with SBMC experts in our shared development laboratory at the TU/e campus in Eindhoven. SBMC is stepping in as a co-financier.”
S4 could greatly improve the reliability of cell-based research. Research has shown that a quarter of cell lines have mycoplasma. While more labs are becoming aware of mycoplasma, the main advice is still to work carefully to prevent it. With S4, the risk of infection is much lower, which means more reliable experiments, less wasted time and resources, and faster development of new therapies for patients.
