Services

WPI CERES

Cell Engineering Research Equipment Suite — an established facility at Gateway Park serving WPI faculty and partner companies. Bioprocess development, strain engineering, and laboratory-scale fermentation are available now, screening from 100 µL to 500 mL.

Current CERES equipment & capabilities

• Beckman Coulter BioLector microbioreactor
• Multi-user automated liquid handling for parallel DBTL workflows
• Laboratory-scale fermentation and analytical equipment
• WPI faculty expertise in bioprocess development, strain engineering, and fermentation science

WPI Bioprocess Center

The Bioprocess Center at 60 Prescott Street runs microbial fermentation on contract, from 1 L to 100 L. Work is scoped project by project: cell banking, media and strain development, fermentation process development and optimization, scale-up, primary harvest, and tangential flow filtration, with HPLC and SDS-PAGE analysis in house. Expression hosts include E. coli, B. subtilis, Streptomyces, yeast, and filamentous fungi.

Current Bioprocess Center equipment

• 100 L Sartorius fermenter
• BioFlo 3000 fermenters at 1 L, 5 L, and 10 L working volume
• Tangential flow filtration, benchtop through Millipore Proflux scale
• Pilot homogenizer, pilot shelf lyophilizer, centrifugation from 1 mL to 1 L
• Agilent 1200 series HPLC

Both facilities operate now. The four services below are being built.

Scale your process

The BioHub Pilot Facility is being designed to support both aerobic and anaerobic fermentation with integrated downstream operations. Sensors and automated sampling will log every run, so scale-up rests on data rather than on a repeated batch.

Downstream is specified for bioindustrial products — high volume at lower unit value — which need different unit operations than pharmaceutical purification: evaporation, spray drying, and membrane filtration at scale. Existing fermentation capacity in the region was built around pharmaceutical separations, and that is the gap this facility closes.

Unit operations on their own

Not every project needs a fermentation campaign. The Pilot Facility is being designed so media formulation, mixing, and downstream steps can be booked independently — for teams that already have material, or already have a strain, and need one operation at volume.

Planned equipment & specs — Pilot Facility

A 10,000 sq ft pilot facility supporting both aerobic and anaerobic fermentation, now in design and permitting. Construction follows approval; the first scale-up projects open once the space is commissioned.

• Bioreactors at 1L, 10L, and 100L — one order of magnitude per step (planned)
• Media formulation and mixing vessels, bookable independently of fermentation (planned)
• Downstream operations: harvest, centrifugation, membrane filtration, evaporation, spray drying (planned)
• Automated sampling, real-time sensor networks, and AI-driven process control (planned)
• Anaerobic-rated workstations and bioreactors for emerging microbiome applications

Engineer your strain

The WPI BioFoundry is the planned expansion of CERES for high-throughput strain engineering. Automated DBTL (design-build-test-learn) cycles generate the data needed to train AI models for strain and process optimization — letting teams iterate faster on host selection, pathway design, and production conditions. Screening runs from 100 µL to 500 mL, feeding directly into the Pilot Facility's 1L–100L range.

Planned equipment & specs — BioFoundry expansion

• Bench-scale stirred-tank bioreactors to bridge microbioreactor screening and pilot scale (planned)
• Expanded liquid-handling automation for parallel DBTL cycles (planned)
• Microbioreactor scale-down studies linked to pilot-scale data for de-risked scale-up

Build the equipment

The MBI Builder’s Lab is a 4,500 sq ft prototyping space operated with MBI, where process-technology startups design, build, and test new bioreactor and unit-operation hardware alongside the people who would run it. Co-location with MBI connects equipment developers to the regional bioindustrial network. Build-out is underway.

The gap is sharpest downstream. Regional capacity was built for pharmaceutical purification, so a company developing separation, evaporation, or drying equipment for bioindustrial streams has nowhere to test it against real fermentation broth at volume. The Pilot Facility, a short walk away, supplies the broth.

Planned equipment & specs — Builder’s Lab

• Shared rapid-prototyping equipment (planned)
• Co-location with MBI to connect equipment developers with the regional bioindustrial network

Train your team

Bioindustrial manufacturing requires skills that aren't well covered by existing biopharmaceutical training programs. The BioHub is developing three competency-based tracks to fill that gap — in partnership with regional educators including Worcester-area community colleges and universities — and will scale instruction through digital-twin and AR/VR-enabled curriculum.