Germany-based Sartorius has entered a research partnership with The BASE Facility at The University of Queensland (UQ), Australia to improve the manufacturing process of nucleic acid products led by the external collaboration group, Separation Technology Marketing team.

The BASE facility is an internationally recognised leader in mRNA sciences at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) at UQ. Associate Professor Tim Mercer and Dr Seth Cheetham are leading the BASE facility using the Sartorius platform to provide process development and pre-clinical production services of pDNA, mRNA, dsRNA and ssRNA for researchers, clinicians and external companies.

Founded in 2021, The BASE facility is funded by Therapeutic Innovation Australia and The University of Queensland. The collaboration will leverage BASE's advanced manufacturing and analytics capabilities including novel next-generation sequencing approaches to co-develop protocols and methods for nucleic acid-based products production.

The BASE facility production platform is equipped with the Ambr 15 multi-parallel bioreactor system along with the Ambr Crossflow for multi-parallel crossflow filtration while the PATfix HPLC system is implemented for analytics and quality control. Teaming up with Sartorius will facilitate mutual collaboration to develop processes and protocols tailored for different nucleic acid-based products. Sartorius platform provides the foundations for implementing automation technologies and Design of Experiments (DoE) principals in bioprocessing.