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Galleries // 2017 Spark:Health // The Octane Cocoon

The Octane Cocoon

Winner - Silver

Competition: Spark:Health
Designer: Timothy Smith - Dr.
Design Type: Automated Bioreactor
Company / Organization / School: Octane Biotech Inc.
Team Members: Ian Grant, Guy Oram, Nuala Trainor, Phil Densham, Taylor Plant & Raelyn Rosa

Personalized medicine is entering a new era as patient-specific treatments are being deployed to fight diseases like cancer. Cell therapy is demonstrating exceptional results; however, the challenge is that the treatment is individualized in that the cells must be produced specifically for the patient. This demanding cell production scenario is achieved through this breakthrough product by Octane. Cocoon is an interlinked bioreactor system used to enable the automated manufacturing of patient-specific cell therapies. The primary objective in the creation of this device was to provide the regenerative tissue and immunotherapy markets with a biologically closed system that conducts the biological processes in an automated, economical and reproducible manner. Other secondary objectives include the integration of information tracking to improve data collection, improving safe and closed sample-collection, providing a stable and controllable thermal environment for cells and accommodating rapid and adjustable scalability to match market demand. These objectives allow end-to-end processing of patient cells or tissues in a sterile cassette enclosed within the Cocoon. This ensures that all aspects of the bioreactor environment such as gas concentrations and temperature are precisely controlled. Fundamentally, the Cocoon system optimizes the biology of growing healthy cells and tissues for re-implantation into the patient.