Improving clostridial toxoid production through molecular fermentation maps (2016-2019)

Toxoid vaccines are used routinely in the livestock industry to prevent animal-disease caused by pathogenic clostridia. Vaccines are produced using batch fermentation processes, which have undergone limited optimization over the past five decades. Low titres and frequent batch failures greatly affect capital utilization and represent a significant cost. Current optimization approaches are fundamentally limited by the use of expensive and noisy endpoint assays. High-throughput chemistry (multi-omics) overcomes this limitation and will be used here to generate detailed molecular maps of fermentation. These fermentation maps will be used to design a new generation of superior fermentation processes.