Zylidac Bio, Prolific Machines Partner to Scale Next-Gen Biologics

Editor’s take: The partnership creates a development and manufacturing pathway spanning early development through commercial-scale supply. Programs can start with cell line development at Prolific and move to Zylidac for scale-up, manufacturing, fill-finish, and packaging.

Zylidac Bio, a biologics CDMO, and Prolific Machines, a biologics development and manufacturing company offering optogenetics-enabled solutions for improved yields, quality, and process control, partnered to scale Prolific’s platform from early development through GMP production. Both companies are headquartered in Emeryville in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Prolific’s technology uses light to control protein expression in engineered cell lines, enabling gains in productivity and product quality. The platform combines optogenetics-enabled cell lines, illumination systems compatible with standard bioreactors, AI-driven process optimization, and advanced analytics. The technology is useful for difficult-to-express proteins including multi-specific antibodies, fusion proteins, cytokines and other complex modalities. 

Zylidac Bio will complete a tech transfer of Prolific’s process at 50-liter scale to reproduce Prolific’s results at the Zylidac site. The companies plan to subsequently scale client programs to 250 liters, and into GMP manufacturing scale. Prolific’s illumination hardware will work with Zylidac’s existing bioreactors, eliminating the need for customers to build new manufacturing infrastructure.  

Deniz Kent, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Prolific, said, “We are very pleased to partner with Zylidac, with a proven team and a great new facility in immediate proximity to our labs in Emeryville. Our science and production teams can work on the same program in the same week, and our clients get a manufacturing partner that already knows the technology.”  

“Our teams visited each other’s labs early on, and it was clear the capabilities were highly complementary,” said Steve Lavezoli, Chief Commercial Officer of Zylidac. “Prolific focuses on early-stage cell line development work, while we offer the process development, scale-up and GMP capacity required for later stages, including programs based on new expression technology like Prolific’s. We built our Emeryville site to take a molecule from cell line to finished product. We’re excited to be the team that takes this technology to production scale.”