Last month, Quartic.ai and Sparta Systems formed a partnership to de-risk manufacturing with artificial intelligence (AI). The companies will combine their products—Quartic AI and TrackWise Digital—to improve steps in bioprocessing and beyond.
“For the past five years or more, industry had this holy grail of a shift to proactive quality management, and our companies share the vision of finally delivering the promise that shift would bring,” says Steve McCarthy, vice president of digital innovation for Sparta Systems.
Using AI and machine learning (ML), adds Larry Taber, vice president of life sciences for Quartic.ai, “we will be able to feed data back and forth to Sparta’s quality-management platform.” That capability will prove invaluable in bioprocessing. For example, “The cost of a lost batch in bioprocessing has implications that are far more significant than with a typical small-molecule drug,” McCarthy says. “If you have to discard a whole reactor load, that has a huge impact from a cost perspective and for the patient waiting for that life-saving, life-changing product.”
To reduce the odds of failure during fermentation, for example, the process can be modeled and tracked with Quartic’s AI and ML. A complete set of bioprocessor-critical parameters can include 200 or more variables. “When you then look at the combinations of interactions, that translates into almost 2,000 features sets,” Taber notes. “The average human can only interpret two to four parameters interacting at a time. That’s where AI and ML come in, allowing control to golden-batch condition and detection of unexpected anomalies in concert with TrackWise Digital,” adding that “We need to predict what might happen and prevent problems before they occur. Instead of reactively managing the process, these combined technologies provide predictive and preemptive quality management.”
This combination of technology also expands the range of potential users. “The idea of AI and ML can be intimidating–like you need to be a data scientist to leverage it, but you don’t,” points out McCarthy.
Instead, platforms from Quartic.ai and Sparta Systems will put AI and ML capabilities in the hands of any professional in bioprocessing, he maintains.
Quartic.ai and Sparta Systems are already building platforms with customers. One of them is Bright Path Labs, which uses continuous bioprocessing technology. This kind of collaboration promises to put bioprocessors in control of manufacturing and quality—being proactive in more and more ways.
