Sunflower is committed to practical innovation at every stage of the development process. We view every contract research project as an opportunity to help your team explore the full potential of your product concepts.
We use our expertise and our proprietary tools to help you consider the whole manufacturing process right from the start.
Together, we can quickly evaluate and optimize the manufacturability of multiple product candidates so there will be no surprises when it’s time to make lots of protein in the future.
Our team has deep experience developing processes for the expression and purification of many types of protein, such as cytokines, hormones, antibodies and antibody-like molecules, subunit antigens, enzymes, and recombinant dairy and meat proteins.
We begin by evaluating the expressibility of your protein concepts in yeast, including understanding achievable productivity and product quality.
We explore the benefits of alternative hosts to make your manufacturing process simpler and more cost-effective. Eukaryotic microbes, like Pichia pastoris, offer a unique ability to secrete proteins very quickly and cleanly. This allows us to iterate through multiple design cycles to find the strain with the highest protein titer and quality in only 2-4 months.
Our first milestone is to provide recommendations on protein sequence changes and/or optimization levers within the strain (promoter, loci, signal sequence, etc). If we notice areas in your protein sequence that may pose challenges to manufacturability (such as features that might impact expression, purification, or quality), we’ll suggest alternatives to test alongside your original sequence.
We find the cultivation media that is the right fit for your strain and product.
We have a variety of stock media formulations, all chemically defined, that are optimized for different protein classes, and we can also develop custom formulations for the specific needs of your product and process.
We use our first-in-class biomanufacturing system to get answers faster.
Our Daisy Petal™ bioreactor uses perfusion fermentation and continuous processing to test key process parameters and collect meaningful data on a range of variables.
Because the Daisy Petal™ manufactures proteins so efficiently, up to grams of protein can be made during testing and can be used for further development of purification processes, protein analysis or other testing.
We can perform Daisy Petal™ demonstrations with your existing strains, or strains we develop together. Our team can also help you design meaningful optimization experiments to run on your own Daisy Petal™ system if you’ve already purchased one.
We develop simple purification processes to save you time and money later.
Protein manufacturing processes don’t have to be complicated. We use straight-through chromatography to enable processes with the minimal number of steps needed for your application.
Let us show you how you can produce more protein with less effort.
We’ll work with you to develop a custom research plan that’s right for your needs and resources.
“The technical expertise of the team at Sunflower has been vital for the development of our protein product. They clearly understand what works and what doesn’t, turning potential dead-ends into pathways forward.”