Testa Center is an open, non-GMP production-like environment/facility and test-bed for education, innovation and proof-of-concept experiments around production of biological products, e.g., monoclonal antibodies, peptides and proteins as well as gene therapy products. Testa Center is a private public partnership making the facility available for the Life Science community in large. The main objective of Testa Center is to promote growth of the Life Science sector and to bridge the gap between discovery and industrialization. Testa Center is owned and operated as a non-profit company by GE Healthcare in Uppsala.
In Testa Center, researchers have access to both equipment and expertise to drive their production process from lab bench scale to industrial pilot scale. The offering includes access to expertise for scaling up experiments for both cell culture (upstream) and protein purification (downstream) for scalability, manufacturability or generation of larger amounts of material.
The facility is designed to be modern, flexible and modular, enabling researchers to perform a wide range of projects covering a complete process or parts of the chain of unit operations. Typically, this could include seed train, bioreactor cultivation, harvest, filtration and protein purification in successive steps.
Testa Center is open for national and international academic and commercial projects. Testa Center was opened in September 2018 and since the start, ten different organizations have executed projects in the Center. Two larger academic institutions (Uppsala University & Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden) have performed projects with the aim at generating larger amounts of material for research as well as extensive educational activities around bioproduction. Several commercial projects have performed projects in Testa Center including mammalian and microbial expression systems for a variety of different proteins.
Prior to entering the execution phase in Testa Center, projects generally go through a longer planning and experimental design phase delineating everything from feasibility, scaling strategy, instrumentation and consumables. The service platform offered is unique in the sense that projects and organizations can work side by side with bioprocessing experts to reduce risk when scaling up and building knowledge around the process.
For cell culturing, Testa Center offers bioreactors from 1-500L for mammalian cells and 1-50L for microbial cultures. For harvest, Testa Center has instrumentation for filtration and as well as batch and continuous centrifugation. For protein purification the Center offers instrumentation from lab bench scale all the way up to pilot- and full-scale production including a variety of column sizes. For a complete instrumentation list, we would like to refer to our web site https://testacenter.com/instruments/ .
For more information and how to apply for a project, please contact Jesper Hedberg, Director Testa Center (jesper.hedberg@testacenter.com).