Meet us, Estonian Biotech Pioneers Pushing Boundaries! See you @ the Estonian Pavilion Booth no 3023

TFTAK is an Estonian privately-owned contract research organization that is designed to solve the most complex challenges in the field of microbial cultivation and food product development. Our mission is to provide excellent support in applied research and product development to our partner enterprises. We value scientific excellence, reliability, dexterity, collaboration, and continuous growth.

• We make bacteria grow fast and maximize viable cell or metabolic by-product yields.
• Over sixteen years of experience in microbial cultivation and detailed metabolism analysis.
• Our know-how makes the optimization process fast and reliable, whether it is a batch, fed-batch, continuous or any other cultivation process.
• Years of experience in multi-species bioprocess development.

We design your process faster, efficient for you and your customers. We design your success!

This cultivation service by TFTAK is an efficient and flexible pipeline designed for viable cell production of any micro-organism.

The general approach relies on three main steps.

1. Genome analysis.
• We analyze annotated genomes to get a list of key properties of the studied species.
• We construct functional metabolic pathway maps and metabolic models that help us understand how the cells function.
• We gather information about potential auxotrophies and medium requirements for the medium screening phase. This helps us make the right decisions even when the species is completely unknown to us.
2. Perform medium component screening with isothermal microcalorimetry.
• Our strength is access to and know-how how to use isothermal microcalorimetry (IMC) as only limited number of labs in the world have it in their labs. We have it!
• The method enables to determine the heat that is generated by microbial metabolism.
• The advantage of the method is its excellent reproducibility and the fact that it works well in opaque environments.
• TFTAK uses the design of experiment approach to determine the medium components that improve growth the most with the shortest time possible.
• The algorithmic approach helps us to decrease the number of combinations needed to optimize the medium.
3. Bioprocess development and downstream processing optimization.
• We optimize high culture density viable cell production or maximize a specific by-product yield.
• Possible depletion of key medium components (e.g. amino acids) are determined and based on the results the final process defined.
• In the case of viable cell production, we will optimize lyophilization procedures and perform long-term stability analysis.

And then!

• We can produce a sample for further applications.
• We have a 7-litre bioreactor and depending on the biomass yield we can produce up to 100 grams of lyophilized cells.