Turnkey inline monitoring removes the model-building cost and operational burden that have kept Raman out of industrial biomanufacturing
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Perceptra, a photonic sensing company pioneering scalable Raman spectroscopy, today announced the successful demonstration of turnkey inline bioprocess monitoring in partnership with Bio Base Europe, a leading biomanufacturing CDMO. The system was deployed with no dedicated calibration study and no changes to the customer’s workflow, a significant step toward bringing continuous, real-time chemical monitoring and process control to every bioreactor and bioprocessing unit in industrial biomanufacturing.
Raman spectroscopy has been the real-time monitoring solution of choice in the biopharma industry for the past twenty years, but it has seen far less adoption in industrial biomanufacturing. The barrier has been the high upfront cost and time of model development, which becomes prohibitive when repeated across the diverse process parameters (growth media, strains, cell densities) of microbial fermentation, in contrast to the more standardized mammalian cell cultures of biopharma. In the pilot study with Bio Base Europe, Perceptra demonstrated that its novel machine learning-based approach to chemometrics produces process-agnostic models, allowing rapid calibration for a fermentation process running under completely new conditions. Perceptra’s hardware also required no modification to the vessels or workflows at Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant, which is critical for CDMOs and biomanufacturing plants that run diverse processes on shared equipment.
The pilot study was conducted on a 150-liter bioreactor at Bio Base Europe’s facility, where Perceptra installed its OmniTrace system, a process Raman analyzer integrated with an immersion probe and machine learning-based chemometric models. The system was calibrated on-site using only two offline HPLC data points and a few hours of data collection during the run’s preparation phase. This is a step change from current practice, in which calibrating chemometric models requires months of effort using statistical approaches such as partial least squares. The study covered two fermentation runs with the same strain but two different growth media: a well-defined multi-component medium and a second-generation feedstock. In both runs, OmniTrace delivered accurate continuous inline measurements of glucose with a root mean square error (RMSE) of approximately 2 g/L. This is the first demonstration of process-agnostic chemometric models for continuous monitoring of the substrate across widely different feedstocks. The model also accurately predicted product titers in the well-defined medium.
Additionally, this deployment required no vessel modifications, no light shielding, and no customer-side test run or model-building, demonstrating that chemical monitoring can be implemented rapidly and with minimal operational burden. The system maintained 100% uptime throughout the runs, providing an uninterrupted window into fermentation chemistry that is simply not possible with conventional sampling. These results were achieved at just 20 mW of laser power compared to 250-400 mW in competing commercial systems. Perceptra’s next system, to be released in Q1 2027, will use higher laser power to reach sub-g/L accuracy.
“Raman spectroscopy has been the gold standard for real-time monitoring in biopharma for two decades, but the cost and time of building a model for every new process kept it out of industrial biomanufacturing,” said Amir Atabaki, CEO and co-founder of Perceptra. “Our goal with this pilot was to show that this barrier is only a limitation of traditional techniques like PLS, and that Perceptra’s proprietary process-agnostic chemometrics mitigates this problem. We believe OmniTrace will enable a host of biomanufacturing companies to implement real-time process monitoring and start seeing its benefits in both R&D and manufacturing. And with the low-cost Raman hardware that we will launch next year, we believe it will become economical to put a Raman probe on every bioprocessing unit.”
“The ability to accurately monitor feedstock, product, and impurity concentrations is increasingly essential for data-driven bioprocess development, and even more so as processes mature into manufacturing, where real-time monitoring and control reduce the risk of process failure and labor-intensive follow-up. Most existing analytical solutions for this are time- and resource-intensive. Perceptra has developed the first solution that is genuinely plug-and-play, and its ease of use is what makes adoption easy to justify,” said Hendrik Waegeman, Head of Business Operations, Bio Base Europe.
Perceptra will commercially launch OmniTrace in Q1 2027, and interested partners can test the system now through a pilot program.
Perceptra is pursuing a two-phase plan to make real-time chemical monitoring ubiquitous. The Bio Base Europe pilot advances the first phase, focused on demonstrating turnkey, process-agnostic operation of Raman analyzers. In parallel, Perceptra is developing a low-cost version of OmniTrace built on a mass-manufacturable photonic chip. By combining process-agnostic operation with low-cost spectroscopy hardware, Perceptra aims to make real-time chemical monitoring possible for every bioreactor, and ultimately every bioprocessing unit in biomanufacturing.
About Perceptra
Perceptra, an MIT spin-out, is a photonic sensing company developing the first scalable Raman spectroscopy solutions through integrated photonic (chip-scale) hardware and novel machine learning algorithms. The company’s mission is to make chemical analysis ubiquitous, addressing challenges across industrial automation as well as public health and safety.
About Bio Base Europe
Bio Base Europe is a leading European pilot and demonstration facility for process development, scale-up and custom manufacturing of bio-based processes for industry. With state-of-the-art fermentation and downstream processing infrastructure and years of expertise, Bio Base Europe partners with innovators worldwide to accelerate the transition to a bio-based economy.
Media Contact: Perceptra – info@perceptra.io
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