Zylidac Bio and Prolific Machines have entered into a partnership to advance Prolific’s light-controlled cell line development technology from early-stage research into good manufacturing practice (GMP) production, creating a pathway for complex biologics to progress toward clinical and commercial supply. The collaboration brings together Prolific’s optogenetics-enabled platform, which uses light to regulate protein expression in engineered cells, and Zylidac’s biologics development and manufacturing capabilities. Zylidac is a contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) within the Zydus Lifesciences group, with a fully integrated facility in Emeryville, California. Both companies are based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Prolific’s platform combines engineered cell lines, illumination hardware compatible with standard bioreactors, artificial intelligence-driven process optimization, and advanced analytics. The approach is designed to improve productivity, process control, and product quality, particularly for proteins that can be challenging to express using conventional manufacturing methods.

Potential applications include multispecific antibodies, fusion proteins, cytokines, and other complex biologic modalities. Prolific has reported a productivity result of 21 g/L during a 15-day intensified fed-batch Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell culture run for a monoclonal antibody at small scale. The company has also reported titer increases of up to threefold for other complex protein formats.

Under the agreement, Zylidac will initially transfer Prolific’s process to its facility and work to reproduce the results at a 50-liter scale. The partners plan to advance selected programs to 250 liters before progressing to GMP manufacturing scales.

A key element of the collaboration is the compatibility of Prolific’s illumination hardware with Zylidac’s existing bioreactors. This integration is intended to allow customers to adopt the technology without investing in entirely new manufacturing infrastructure.

Deniz Kent, PhD. CEO and Co-founder of Prolific Machines, says the partnership addresses the next stage of the platform’s development: translating productivity gains demonstrated during development into manufacturing processes suitable for clinical and commercial supply. The companies’ close proximity in Emeryville is also expected to facilitate coordination between their scientific and production teams.

The arrangement is designed to provide Prolific customers with a connected route from cell line development through manufacturing. Programs can begin with Prolific’s technology and then move to Zylidac for process development, scale-up, drug substance and drug product manufacturing, fill-finish, and packaging.

Steve Lavezoli, chief commercial officer of Zylidac, says the companies’ capabilities complement one another, with Prolific focused on early-stage cell line development and Zylidac providing the process development expertise and GMP capacity needed for later manufacturing stages.

Zylidac’s Emeryville facility was designed to support programs across the product lifecycle, from cell line development through finished product manufacturing. The partnership extends those capabilities to programs using Prolific’s light-controlled expression technology. By linking an emerging cell engineering platform with established manufacturing infrastructure, the companies aim to help developers of complex biologics move from laboratory-scale results toward production processes that can support clinical development and eventual commercialization.

For more information, visit www.prolific-machines.com or www.zylidacbio.com.